In a scene in Sink, Sank, Sunk – a three-part series about a mother-son relationship that released two years ago – two gay men, played by Will Seefried and Keshav Moodliar, are discussing relationships by the lambent glow of a campfire.
“People are not meant to pair off. It’s not natural,” says Seefried.
“I have never been able to get onboard with the natural-unnatural thing,” says Moodliar. “Human beings are all different. For some, pairing off is great. For others, it is not. I don’t think either is good or bad. And neither is unnatural.”
Moodliar is a talented actor. Myriad emotions play across his face, framed by the sparks of the fire, as he engages in a subtle mating game with Seefried, teasing, flirting, probing…. Like all good actors, he makes you believe that he believes in what he is saying. Maybe he does. After all, most actors are drawn to roles that adhere, however loosely, to their own reality. “All the pain and joy we have encountered live in us in beautifully specific ways – and the greatest gift we have as actors is that we are given a license to investigate those experiences and pick them up afresh,” he says. “The work, in that sense, never ceases, because we are always learning about the world, and in turn discovering new things about ourselves.”
He stumbled into acting almost by accident, in pursuit of another worthy cause: love. Sometime in the eighth grade, he was walking past an audition for an annual school play, The Boy Who Fell into the Book, when his friend forced him to go in with him, because he wanted to stand next to the girl he was madly in love with. “I ended up playing ‘The Boy’, and was fully and wholly obsessed with performing from that moment on,” says Moodliar. He was gripped by the sheer adrenaline and thrill of going onstage. As he says, “Something about the lights and scale of theatre, which makes you feel both tiny and larger than life – not to mention that it created a space where an auditorium of people had to be silent and listen to you for two hours, which was special in its own way for a 13-year-old.”
After graduating from Ramjas College in Delhi, Moodliar became the first Indian to be accepted into The Juilliard School’s MFA programme in acting. The four years he spent there, he says, will always be the most important in his acting and personal journey. “Juilliard gave me an opportunity and a safe space to fail every day for 4 years,” he says. “It definitely was the biggest lesson I learned from my time there – that there is no one way to get this thing called ‘acting’ right. It is about showing up day and night and just being present, and truthful, under imaginary circumstances.”
Since then, Moodliar has acted in several plays and shows. He was the first Indian to play Romeo in The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of Romeo and Juliet. He recently finished shooting the pilot episode of a new television show for FX, starring Chris Messina and Ari Graynor, and is currently scheduled to shoot a pilot for the ABC drama, Wreckage, based on Emily Bleeker’s book about the survivors of a plane crash. He also teaches acting at the New York Film Academy.
One of the characters which hold a special place in Moodliar’s heart is Ray from the play Red Speedo, which was performed in his final year at Juilliard. He plays an Olympic swimmer who is caught with performance enhancing drugs on the night before the qualification round for the Olympics. Moodliar lost 25 pounds for the play, which, he says, “wrestles with just what we are willing to do to succeed”. He says the play taught him a lot about himself.
Perhaps among them was the insight that no matter where you go or how many times you fall, you are always enough. “We live at a time when the whole world has screeched to a halt,” he says. “There are millions of people all over the globe who are relying on the work of actors and other artistes to get through the day. So never let anyone ever tell you that what you do is ‘non-essential’. Because you have the capacity to change a life, the ability to question the world we are in today, and the power to spread true joy. And that is a very special thing.”