Shaitan series: Here’s why lead actor Rishi did not dub for his role as Bali in any version of the show

Kannada actor Rishi’s Telugu web series debut, Shaitan, dropped on Disney+Hotstar today. The show, directed by Mahi V Raghav, has Rishi in the lead, as Bali, a role for which the actor took pains to learn Telugu, not only to understand his lines, but to also convey them effectively. The hope, he had told us earlier, was to be able to dub for his role in the original Telugu version and the Kannada one too.

Those who have followed Rishi’s work on TV and Kannada cinema will know that the actor has a good voice and pleasant intonation while speaking, so it came as a bit of surprise when the trailer of the show dropped and his voice was nowhere to be heard. “Yes, unfortunately, I was not able to dub for my role in Shaitan. I had made it a point to learn Telugu, but regular Telugu and the local dialect of Telangana are vastly different and while I could learn all my lines by-heart, even if they were several pages long, I was not sure if I could effectively carry off the slang of the region. My character Bali hails from the lower strata of society, so the language he speaks is not very polished. This is a role that required a native speaker to dub and that is what the team opted for eventually,” he explains. The show is available in Kannada audio also, apart from Tamil, Malayalam and Hindi. Did he not want to dub at least for the Kannada version? “I did, but we could not match the schedules of the dubbing and my shoot for another project, so I missed out on the opportunity,” he rues.

As for the show, Rishi says that his character Bali will come across as quite a shocker for his audiences back home. “Audiences here will probably wonder if this is really Rishi. It is very raw, rugged, and the role has a lot of violence. Those who are used to seeing me as the boy-next-door will be surprised with how massy a role it is,” he says.