Intekhab Dinar has been working steadily across television, film and the stage for long enough to have a settled view of why he keeps doing it. Acting, he says, lets him live many lives, trying on characters he would never otherwise encounter within a single lifetime.
His next film is “Khalnayak”, directed by Vicky Zahed and shot in Kolkata, with Shahiduzzaman Selim among the cast. Dinar says the film holds elements designed to keep an audience engaged, and that working outside the country changed the rhythm of the shoot in useful ways.
Two other films are in hand. “Hangor”, directed by Tanmoy Surjo, is set among coastal communities, with Dinar playing a resident of the coast. In “Nil Jochonay”, directed by Fakhrul Arefin, he takes a negative role, which he treats as the more interesting assignment of the two because it offers less room to fall back on sympathy.
On television he is currently appearing in “Chawa Pawa” on NTV and “Khushbu” on Deepto TV.
He traces almost all of it to the stage. Dinar spent years with Nagarik Natya Sampradaya, and credits the group with whatever he has managed in the profession since, saying that what he has achieved through acting came to him from the stage. His television debut was in “Gor”, written by Gazi Rakayet and directed by Salahuddin Lavlu.
The theatre grounding shows in how he talks about preparation. Dinar is less interested in the question of range than in the problem of making a character plausible from the inside, which is the kind of discipline a stage run of a single play enforces by repetition.
The variety in his current slate, a Kolkata thriller, a coastal drama, a villain and two serials, is the point rather than an accident of scheduling. It is a working actor’s answer to the problem of staying interested.
