Prasenjit Chatterjee, Aditi Rao Hydari, Aparshakti Khurana, Vikramaditya Motwane on Prime Video’s Period Bollywood Series ‘Jubilee’ (EXCLUSIVE)
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The next magnum opus from Amazon Prime Video India is “Jubilee,” a period piece that charts the growing pangs of India and the rise of the country’s Hindi-language film industry that would come to be known by the term Bollywood in later years.
Beginning around the months in 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned into India and Pakistan, the dramatis personae in the series include studio boss Srikant Roy (Prasenjit Chatterjee), his movie star wife Sumitra Kumari (Aditi Rao Hydari), trusted aide with acting ambitions Binod Das (Aparshakti Khurana), talented refugee Jay Khanna (Sidhant Gupta) and courtesan Nilofer (Wamiqa Gabbi), whose worlds collide.
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The series is created by Vikramaditya Motwane (“Sacred Games”) and Soumik Sen (“Mahalaya”) and written by Atul Sabharwal (“Class of ’83”). It is produced by Andolan Films in association with Reliance Entertainment and Phantom Studios.
Motwane says that the genesis of the series was a decade ago when the world was exposed to quality series like “Game of Thrones,” “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men.” “You’re watching all this amazingly layered storytelling with these phenomenal actors and such cracking writing. And one of the moments where we were dreaming was what if we could do a really cool series based on the Indian film industry back in the 1950s. And that snowballed over a period of time into actually taking wings as an idea,” Motwane told Variety.
Chatterjee, a seasoned actor respected across India, who is the undisputed superstar of Bengali-language cinema, drew upon his vast experience to inform the role. Chatterjee’s father Biswajit was a popular leading man of the 1960s. “I’m from this industry, from my childhood, I know about the history of New Theatres [a studio that operated from 1931-1955], I know the history of a lot of studios and the history of the people who are the makers,” Chatterjee told Variety. “Srikant Roy is somebody who only believes in cinema and yes, he’s a boss, he’s the owner, that’s fine, but at the same time, he can go to any extent for cinema.”
Rao Hydari, who is one of the few Indian actors who works with equal felicity across the Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam-language industries, most recently headlined ZEE5’s Mughal empire-set series “Taj: Divided by Blood.” Motwane provided Rachel Weisz’s performance in “The Favourite” as a reference point to the actor.
“I didn’t watch any old Indian films and my visual references were Audrey Hepburn and Maharani Gayatri Devi [the queen consort of Jaipur in the 1940s] and that helped me because Sumitra Kumari has this trapped vulnerability, which she hides with this badassery, if I may say so,” Rao Hydari told Variety. “She’s like this princess trapped in a castle yearning for this love that she’s possibly never seen. But she’s also a power woman with so much agency in a man’s world.”
The role played by rising star Aparshakti Khurana (“Stree,” “Dhokha”) harks back to Dilip Kumar, one of Indian cinema’s greatest actors. Khurana says that he was compared to the late actor at a very young age, but he did not watch any of Kumar’s works in preparation for the role.
“I’m not acting like a guy who was acting in the 1940s, the emotion and acting is very today. The energy maintained is that of 2023,” Khurana told Variety, adding that he takes any comparison to Kumar as a “huge compliment.”
On what will draw international audiences to “Jubilee,” Motwane says, “The global appeal lies in the fact that is a peek into the very specifics of India in a moment – not just the film industry, but India at a moment in time where partition has just happened and how it’s actually affecting some people in that moment,” adding that the series also tackles how “the Russians and the Americans tried to influence propaganda in in the country.”
Next up for Motwane is a feature titled “Control.” Rao Hydari has Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series “Heeramandi” in the works. Khurana has completed “Berlin,” directed by “Jubilee” writer Sabharwal, while Chatterjee has Atanu Ghosh’s “Shesh Pata” due.
Part 1 (episodes 1-5) of “Jubilee” will stream from April 7 and part 2 (episodes 6-10) from April 14.
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