*I attended this event as a guest of Disney/ABC/DisneyXD and any opinions are 100% my own.
Million Dollar Arm is now in theaters and so far people are really loving this film. Families are loving the film.
Recently I shared our interview the real Rinku and Dinesh, who were the winners of the first ever Million Dollar Arm Competition in India. Now it’s time to hear from the two awesome actors that played those two amazing guys on-screen.
Interview with Madhur Mittal
and Suraj Sharma
Madhur Mittal played Dinesh and Suraj Sharma played Rinku.
We started the interview by asking what made them want to audition for such strong roles with an inspirational and true story behind them.
MADHUR: I think the first thing that really hit me was, this is a tremendous feat that these guys have achieved and I had no idea about these guys. Nobody in my family knew. None of my friends knew this story. What these guys have achieved is something that nobody has ever done in any sport in the history of mankind.
So, I was really kind of upset and I know for a fact that so was Suraj, that we do not – nobody knew about this story. I think it’s very important that this story reaches people and that was the first thing that hit me. Also the fact that, you know, we’ll get a chance to portray real-life characters.
SURAJ: Yes, same thing. It’s just the fact that these guys that came from nothing, went and did something phenomenal. Nobody seems to realize that nothing was ever…they weren’t really appreciated for what they did.
MADHUR: In a way, yes. They’re not applauded enough.
SURAJ: Exactly. It depressed me almost and the fact that I didn’t know myself. It just leads you to think that their story really needs to be told, and people need to know this.
Other than the fact that it was an amazing feat, it just gives you a sense that there’s a whole lot out there that we don’t really realize., opportunity wise. The amount someone can work in a situation, where they don’t know what’s going on, and make something out of themselves, is really…it’s very inspiring.
MADHUR: I think it gave both of us a chance to showcase something different from what people have seen us do in our last films as well. I played a bad guy in my last film; he played a completely different character. It’s a great chance for us as young actors to portray something different and expand our spectrum as actors.
Knowing that Million Dollar Arm is based on the true story of two men from India that won a contest and learned to baseball in the Major Leagues, we had to ask if Madhur and Suraj had you played any baseball prior to the film?
SURAJ: Absolutely not. Zero experience in baseball altogether. Yes. It was quite hard. We had a lot of fun during training though.
MADHUR: I mean we didn’t know anything and then we were going to try to get all this stuff under our belt real quickly. We had three and a half weeks to do whatever we could do. Our coaches flown down from the states. We used to have four hours of baseball every day and we are both quite scrawny boys, still very thin.
So we had to put on a lot of muscle, you know. We trained for three or four hours every day and then rest an hour, and then go to the gym for a couple of hours, and strict diet. Yes, it was quite physically challenging, but it helped, because it’s like a blank slate that you sling it with, which was exactly what his character and my character were also going through.
They didn’t know anything, and then they had very little time; high pressure to make it, do it and, you know, there’s no other option. So it helped understand the emotional parts.
SURAJ: Yes, I also think we had a lot of draw from the fact that we were in the similar situation, you know, We had a really short amount of time to prepare and then we had to perform on set.
And also these guys they had like 10 months of preparation, and they had to perform. So I think it puts us in a similar kind of mind frame.
Playing roles that are based on real life people can sometimes give you the advantage of meeting them and getting to know them in person.
We wondered if that was the case with Dinesh, Rinku, Madhur, and Suraj. Did they get to meet each other before or during filming? Did they pull anything away from meeting them that they could apply to their roles?
SURAJ: For me, the biggest problem was that Rinku, ever since this time period that we are trying to portray, ever since then he’s changed massively, tremendously.
He’s so good at adapting that since, this point when the movie ends, from here to here, he’s become a completely different person. Talking to him at this point doesn’t really help me too much with all this that we’re trying to do. But Dinesh helped.
MADHUR: Yes, Dinesh helped. Dinesh was with us in Delhi when we were training for baseball and he hung out with us a lot, which is obviously great for me, because I’m portraying him in the film.
But what he also did was, you know, not just give us an insight hint of his mind, but he used to tell us all these stories and anecdotes of what happened when they were really going through all this that we’re portraying in the film.
And that would really give us a lot of insight into how Rinku was at the point in time or how JB was and how Aasif’s character was. Just real insights into how these people were feeling when everything was unraveling in front of them. That was really great and getting a lot of time to spend with Dinesh was really helpful for both of us.
SURAJ: And also the fact that Pitobash’s character in real life really did have a video camera. He basically went around recording footage of everything through the process.
MADHAR: Literally everything. Yes.
SURAJ: So we had this massive footage.
MADHUR: Massive treasure.
SURAJ: That’s how we got to know them before everything happened. Just their body language was so different. Their physique was different. The way they looked at stuff and talked about everything was really different. So all these things together kind of helped us build these people in our heads.
Watching Million Dollar Arm, it looks like the cast had a lot of fun working together. They all mesh well on-screen and really have a “family vibe” going on.
Many of those scenes have great humor in them as well. We had to find out what Madhur and Suraj’s favorites scenes to film were.
SURAJ: That a tough one. We actually had so much fun, just every day. It’s like we were quite a handful…we were just two young kids, and you give us a glove and ball….we would just keep playing all day long. They would literally have to drag us on set, but we had a lot of fun in a lot of scenes. For example, the scene where they throw up was not fun.
MADHUR: Not fun for me. It stank! They had some really disgusting vegetarian soup. Yes, and it really stank.
SURAJ: It wasn’t really while we were shooting that made it special, it was just literally the fact that everybody around us always was seemingly having an extremely awesome time.
Amazing time. It’s not like you’re having an amazing time and you’re letting go of work, you know, kind of situation. It was the fact that all of that added to the dynamic that hopefully was being set up in front of the frame, you know.
MADHUR: We were enclosed in four walls and there was this huge ground in the middle. So we had no air flow and the sun just beating down from top with thousands of these people in this small space. It was really hot and we had scenes where we were running around and pitching and what not.
SURAJ: Yes. It wasn’t the hardest for us. Imagine those 300 to 400 people standing there in the heat.
MADHUR: Yes, and just in the heat.
SURAJ: And they have to act excited.
MADHUR: It’s very hard and they don’t even do it professionally like we do, so it’s really hard.
SURAJ: But, you know, they managed to do it. Everybody pushed through it all. There were a lot of times when stuff got really hard or complicated for everybody.
MADHUR: Jon probably changed his t-shirt like 20 times.
SURAJ: It was really hot, but people managed. People really did, especially Jon. I felt like he’s got this adaptive feature to him that you don’t often see.
MADHUR: He’s a bit like Rinku that way.
SURAJ: Rinku’s also a little bit that way. You get somewhere, extremely different, and then you just start taking in whatever you can as fast as you can and you slowly start understanding what’s going on. A lot of people in our crew went through that when we were in India and we kind of used that when we went to America, to Atlanta.
MADHUR: Hotlanta. Ya’ll making a movie. It was fun we had a blast. Good times.
SURAJ: Yes, very good times.
Both of these roles required a wide range of emotions as the story unfolds. Madhur and Suraj did a wonderful job of showing those emotions in a way that captures what Rinku and Dinesh were going through.
We had to find out if they had any past experiences that they were able to draw on to help them develop those strong emotions.
MADHUR: Definitely. Firstly the fact that we were doing this in itself, it was like a parallel to what was going on, because we had to learn really quickly and then, you know, perform something that we have never done before and be good at the same thing.
Then also with the mother obviously, with Slum Dog Millionaire and in life where you’re suddenly nobody’s and then you’re thrown and you’re supposed to be something right. It affects you very strongly, and whether you try using it or not, it’s going to be used by you, because at end of the day it’s the experience that’s the strongest and the closest.
URAJ: You try to use whatever you can and it’ll never get up to the level that which they felt it. You can always get an essence and then build from there.
Madhur Mittal previously starred in Slumdog Millionaire and Suraj Sharma starred in Life of Pie. We knew they starred in those films prior to Million Dollar Arm, but to close out the interview, we wanted to know how they both got into acting.
MADHUR: Very different stories for both of us. I have been in the business ever since I could remember. I started my career as a Michael Jackson impersonator as a child before I was three. That’s how I got into the entertainment business.
When I was five, my whole family shifted from Agra, where I was born to Mumbai, just so I could pursue a career in the arts. A really amazing supportive family and they struggled and really pushed for me. I always wanted to be an actor, you know, be in the movies. So I’ve always worked and strived hard to be that.
SURAJ: For me, I never knew I wanted to be an actor, or anything to do with film. With Life of Pi it was more of realization, you know, to some extent I might have not been able to do anything, unless that had happened. That just opened my eyes to the fact that, oh, wow, look there is something here that I actually….I love a lot. And that’s how it began.
MADHUR: It’s very liberating to be on a film set. As a child I was very shy, a complete introvert. Not the kind of person I am today at all. Even then I remember that I wouldn’t be able to answer questions to people or be very communicative, but when I was on stage I was a different person. That’s when I felt the most confident and the most alive, and I felt that this is where I belong and this is what I’m meant to do. This is where I’m meant to be. And I’m sure Suraj feels the same way.
SURAJ: Same way. Your surrounded by so many weirdoes who are trying to make something out of nothing and I love it. They are full of passion. By weirdoes, I mean it in a very positive way. Like we were saying, you know, insanity is legal on a film set.
MADHUR: You need it.
SURAJ: I mean you’d be crazy to want to work on a film or movies, but just because of the hours, the amount your working and the amount you have to give to it.
MADHUR: The amount of creative egos at work at the same spot.
SURAJ: There’s a lot that’s happening and to want to deal with that itself, just because of the fact that you’re making movies, you know, it’s as simple as that. You need to be crazy and you feel- I feel very much at home in that situation.
MADHUR: Also, I think it’s one of those businesses. I’m very proud to be a part of a business where you accept people from all walks of life and, you know, just a tremendous spectrum of people from different cultures who look different and just coming together and creating art. That’s awesome.
Million Dollar Arm is in theaters nationwide! If you are looking for something to do over the upcoming Memorial Day Weekend, this is the movie you want to see! You can read my review of Million Dollar Arm for more game changing fun!
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