Udita Jhunjhunwala, Friday November 9 2007 13:15 IST

John Abraham is addicted to speed. “I love going fast,” says the Dhoom actor. But he’s definitely not addicted to cigarettes. He may have had to smoke 80 a day in his role as K in No Smoking, but he’s adamantly anti the habit. Anurag Kashyap’s film was important for Abraham, especially as his last two commercial releases failed to make waves at the box office. Baabul and Salaam-E-Ishq were big budget, big name commercial movies, once considered ‘safe’. But the actor’s experience has nudged him towards a different strategy. After all it is his offbeat, non-commercial films that have earned him — and the films themselves — accolades, be it Water, Taxi 9211, Zinda or Kabul Express.

Not that Abraham is shying away from commercial films. On the contrary he will be seen in Vivek Agnihotri’s football film Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal in November and has signed up for a romcom for Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions (with Abhishek Bachchan and Priyanka Chopra). Experience has taught him the value of patience and the unarguable opportunity for a new kind of Indian cinema to flourish. As he explains, “Unfortunately Indian audiences have not been given choices beyond a certain genre or beyond a certain linear form of storytelling. No Smoking comes from somewhere else and creates something new for the audience to choose from. It’s a beginning, but we need to be patient, and ride out the bleeding period.”

The MBA degree holding model-turned-actor believes it is time to stop taking the audience for granted. “The audience is smart and evolved and we need to give them more credit than we do. We think of commercial cinema as something that works and will keep working. But the film industry is growing 25 per cent every year. We are a $5 billion industry; multiplex screens are increasing and the kind of audiences coming in to watch films is also being segmented,” he says.

He cites the examples of his non-commercial films to emphasise his point. “Look at films like Taxi 9211, Zinda, Water, Kabul Express, all of my recent films except two commercial films have succeeded. The two so-called big commercial films failed even though I was assured that they were ‘safe’, big star cast films. But star cast is clearly not enough.” Hence the choice of Kashyap’s No Smoking, even though it failed to light up the box-office and Nagesh Kukunoor’s Aashayein. His sensibility extends beyond Bollywood and he cites Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Tony Scott’s True Romance and Christopher Nolan’s Memento among his favourite international offbeat films.

Abraham’s headline earning relationship with Bipasha Basu, his well-cared-for body and passion for bikes is better documented than his education, intellect or acting abilities. Ask him about the status of his relationship with Basu and he says, slightly guarded, “Nothing has changed. It’s about being mature and about a level of security in the relationship. We came into our relationship at a point in time when we were already mature. We’ve lasted almost six years while still being very independent people.”

But can brains and brawn co-exist in Bollywood? “I enjoy physicality at times but I really believe that your body and good looks, while important, can only take you through the first five-seven minutes of the film. If the audience is still ogling at your body after that, and not paying attention to your character, then it’s over. Sriram Raghavan, director of one of my new films (co-starring Aishwarya Rai), said that his biggest challenge was to make me look nondescript in a crowd,” he says. And then, as a parting shot, almost intended to silence his critics, Abraham adds, “If good looks and physique were so important then all the male models who have tried to crossover to films would have succeeded, but none have.” It’s hard to argue that.