August 2008

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August 2008 

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Spotlight

Vik Sahay’s Magic Carpet Ride

As an actor, how do you approach a scene where your wealthy character walks out of a New Delhi mansion nattily dressed and talking on a cellphone, while at your feet are limbless beggars? Not actors playing beggars; not extras who are in on the script; but the real thing. “We were just shooting in the surroundings,” Vik Sahay says of shooting the Canadian film Amal in India. “There was barely any ability to control the set.”


Sahay used his discomfort to find his character, Vivek. The spoiled son of a rich man who has just died, Vivek discovers his dad left his entire fortune to a New Delhi rickshaw driver with whom he had one brief encounter. Vivek is not happy. 

 

“Playing a character who’s so focused on money and living a Western lifestyle, and then to be thrust into a setting where people are trying to survive on the most basic level is so disorienting,” says Sahay, who was born in Nepean, Ontario, but now keeps apartments in L.A. and Toronto and is in the latter for this interview. “For me, losing my bearings was great because it fed right into my character.”

 

And it made the shoot “one of the most profound, big, otherworldly magic-carpet-ride experiences I’ve ever had,” says Sahay, who also plays scheming techie Lester on NBC’s Chuck. In fact, it was returning to North America to shoot Chuck that really threw Sahay.

 

“The craziest part about it was, ‘Cut,’ ‘Wrap,’ then brushing off the dirt of the streets, and less than two months later I was on a soundstage in Burbank, California, doing a crackling comedy. These are all amazing things, and I’m so lucky. But it was wild.”


– Marni Weisz


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    As the largest motion picture exhibitor in Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates 130 theatres with 1,347 screens serving more than 70 million guests annually. Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Cineplex Entertainment operates theatres from British Columbia to Quebec and is the largest exhibitor of digital, 3D and IMAX projection technologies in the country.