He was a fourth grader at Sophia Public School, Roorkee, when a film crew landed in his school. Close to 200 students participated in an audition process that went on for a couple of days, until one day Mohammad Samad was the only one left on the list. He bagged the lead role in Gattu—a film about an orphan who yearns to conquer a mysterious, unconquered black kite, Kali.
“I did not know how to act,” says Samad, 19, recalling a scene in which he had to cry and did not know how to. “I did not even know that I was in an audition. But, once I got the part, I realised that I can act, and did not mind taking it further.” The director, Rajan Khosa, and others in the team, mentored him. “They asked me to imagine that I have a goat which has been stolen, and was butchered, ruthlessly,” he says. “After a point, I started crying.”
He had learnt one trick of acting. And, it was just the beginning. For the lead role in Netflix series Selection Day—based on Aravind Adiga’s namesake book—he had to appear for three auditions. The series, which was released last December, has earned him fulsome praise for his performance as an aspiring cricketer. The second season will be released in April.
I met Samad in a five-star hotel in a Mumbai suburb, along with Rajesh Tailang and Yash Dholye, his co-stars from Selection Day. While Samad narrates the stories of his journey as an actor, Tailang tells me that he never felt that his young colleague was an amateur.
Before joining Selection Day, Samad did two others films—Shlok Sharma’s Haraamkhor and Rahi Anil Barve’s Tumbbad. Both roles were noted and appreciated by critics.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui, his co-actor from Haraamkhor, says Samad is a born actor. “The spontaneity with which he acts is unmatched,” says Siddiqui. Sohum Shah, who plays his father in Tumbbad—also the producer of the film—says that he was amazed by Samad's performance in front of the camera. The horror-fantasy took more than six years to complete, because of its theme; Shah says the boy’s excitement never waned throughout the period.
Samad himself knows well the reason that kept up his spirits—his urge to act and grow. The second of six siblings, he has found his path already and wants to stay on it.
His father, Kashil Ahmed, runs a grocery store. He could not have been more happier about his son's evolution as an actor. Ahmed remembers how his son, even at a young age, showed immense courage. The boy was diagnosed with polio at an early age; for three years, there were plasters on his legs as the parents made rounds of hospitals. “Samad is a fighter,” says Ahmed. A few years later, he had a bad head injury, too. “The doctors did not know what to do. We struggled to keep him healthy and fine,” he says.
If the boy's health used to be his father's biggest worry, now it is his academics. He lost track of academics by the time Gattu was done. Samad says that when his marks dipped, his father was disheartened. “He scolded me, took me to task. But, I had lost interest in studies by then,” Samad says.
However, the actor somehow finished Class 10. “He is doing good in his acting career. He already has two more films,” says Ahmed. “But, I still hope that he takes up studies.”