Interview: Saif Ali Khan jokes he joined Marvel’s Wastelanders because ‘they pay well’

Saif Ali Khan is officially entering the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Well, sort of. His voice is at least, as the lead of Audible’s new Hindi original podcast series Marvel’s Wastelanders: Star-Lord. Saif voices who else but Star-Lord himself (played by Chris Pratt in the live-action Guardians Of The Galaxy movies).

Wastelanders is set in an alternate future of the MCU where the villains have finally won and the heroes are nothing but a bad memory. The audio series includes an impressive voice cast including Kareena Kapoor Khan, Masaba Gupta, Prajakti Koli and Jaideep Ahlawat, to name a few.

Superhero-ing aside, 2023 also marks 30 years of Saif on screen. At a suburban Mumbai film studio, he spoke to me about stepping into the Marvel universe, staying relevant for 30 years and the current shaky state of Hindi cinema.

Edited Excerpts:

What are the kinds of thoughts, calculations, and questions that come up in your mind when you’re offered to voice a popular Marvel superhero for an audio series in Hindi? I imagine that’s a very specific offer.

How much, how long and what is it? Like with everything I do (laughs). Not necessarily in that order. And it worked because it’s Marvel of course. They pay well. It’s a fair amount of work. It took about a week. We did two episodes a day. And the content was great. It’s so well written and just that idea of telling a story just through audio with effects and things like that. There’s no limit to your imagination with something like this and I was just happy to do it.

What’s the creative process like on a series like this? How is finding your character in an audio project different from on-screen? Are you being directed?

Yeah, I’m being superbly well-directed by Mantra who’s very experienced in the audio world. In a movie, you have various tools at your disposal to convey certain things, but here it’s just your voice. But it’s pretty much the same creative process. Your voice is the end product of a thought or an emotion you’re trying to convey. It’s the same thing as a movie pretty much except there’s no hiding behind anything else.

This year marks 30 years of you on screen. At this point, you’ve done it all pretty much in terms of genre and sensibility. Whether it’s drama, romance or dark comedy, across both films and streaming. At this stage in your career is there a bucket list of the kind of roles that you haven’t had a chance to do yet?

No, because everything keeps changing. Who would’ve thought I would’ve done a Sacred Games? Or even Adipurush, for example, which is influenced by Marvel in terms of the effects and scale of the movie. And it’s all changing right now, and we’re lucky to be in an industry that’s in flux and still growing. But I’ve never had a bucket list of who to work with and what I want to do. I’m just lucky people still want to work with me. I’m currently doing a Red Chillies Productions movie with a young director called Pulkit and he said everyone in the movie was his first choice. It feels good when a young director says you’re the first choice for the role.

I also imagine that when someone has worked as long as you have as a leading man, one of the biggest challenges is staying relevant especially when things are constantly changing and evolving. What’s the key to staying relevant through so much change?

I think you have to be lucky. It’s all luck. You have to be lucky enough to have a worldview that moves with the times, so you don’t get dated and jaded in your approach and style. You have to stay fluid and be aware of changes in performance style. You mentioned dark comedy so doing a film like Kaalakaandi, for example, which puts you in a different zone. Or even just working with different kinds of actors. I am currently shooting with Sanjay Mishra in Punjab, for example, and playing a Haryanvi cop where you have to work on your accent. Things like that just keep you on your toes. It’s like sports or working out. You just have to keep practising and pushing yourself.

So, I think staying relevant is a combination of people wanting to work with you and you wanting to experiment and play different parts. But ultimately it’s the audience who needs to have some interest in you. And, I was just telling someone the other day, they don’t tell you these things when you join the industry. It’s not about acting really, it’s about having an X-factor that keeps people interested in you.

Speaking of the audience, there’s a lot being said about where Hindi cinema is at currently, how films from the South are dominating the box office and the idea that popular Hindi cinema is out of touch with the audience right now. Is that something that worries you at all?

I mean it’s never really worried me. It probably should but I never really worry about my work. It has its relevance in my life but I like to do other things and focus on my family and friends and things like that. But I do feel we lost that connect some time ago. We used to have songs in our movies, for example, and then I think there was a wave of makers who said ‘let’s not do that’ and I don’t know if that was a good thing. We have a lot of growing to do, but I do feel we could be making better movies. We just haven’t made films that people are enjoying.

I do think we’re on the right path though. I never dreamt that we’d be making Adipurush or even the other films I’m doing now, which are very absorbing. There are a bunch of talented young directors in the web space. And it’s good that the web has come because we’ve always had a more nuanced, artistic breed of filmmaker and a more commercial eye-on-the-box-office kind of filmmaker. Let the first group rock it on the web and the second group rock it on the big screen. We released Kaalakaandi in theatres, for example, and we shouldn’t have. That should have been on Netflix. But we just didn’t know it at the time. But I think this a phase for the industry and we’ll learn quickly and adjust and I’m pretty sure we’ll get out of it.