by MATTHEW HAYS

John Abraham asks for a moment before we can sit down and discuss his most recent feature. Two young Indo-Canadian girls have discovered a well-kept secret at the Toronto International Film Festival: The hotel patio, which is open to the public, is where most of the stars congregate during and between press interviews.

Abraham, one of the cast of Deepa Mehta’s Water, the final film in her trilogy of the elements, is eager to talk about it. But the two girls have tracked him down and are now eager to get his autograph. Abraham politely obliges.

With only four Indian features under his belt, Abraham is already a major star in his nation’s massive film industry. Now he’s attracting a good deal of attention on this continent with his latest turn, playing a young 1930s idealist who falls passionately in love with a widow (played by Lisa Ray).

Abraham, 32, began acting in India after several years of modelling. He was contacted by a woman who had seen his photographs and decided to give him a shot at screen acting. That led to his first role, playing an alcoholic lawyer in Jism (2002). “When I made that film, I think the perception was, ‘He’s a male model, so he’s going to fail.’ They were pleasantly surprised instead. People said, ‘You acted well,’ rather than ‘You looked good.’ So that felt like a good sign.”

East vs. West

Abraham picked up several more roles, with 2004’s Dhoom bringing him the broadest attention. There he played a motorcycling thief. It was during this shoot that he got the call from Mehta, eager to cast him in her latest film. “I loved the script. There was no question about whether or not to take it. I wanted ‘Deepa Mehta’ on my resumé. And it would be my break into Western filmmaking. Next thing you know, I find out the film will be opening the Toronto Film Festival. Not a bad introduction to Western films, I’d say.”

Abraham confirms that there’s a serious shifting of gears when moving from Indian to Western filmmaking. “Someone once said to me that there are three kinds of movies: good, bad and Indian. Indian movies have this sensibility that’s just completely different from anything else. Indian audiences expect different things. They are very passionate, they love the idea of song and dance. Indians exaggerate, they are like the Italians, they talk with their hands.”

This, he says, translates to different working methods as well. “There’s lots of disguised employment on Indian sets. A unit of 20 people here would have at least 80 or 100 people there. There’s a lot of madness on the set. But there’s a method to the madness. The country produces close to 1,000 features a year.”

Learning to walk the walk

That said, Abraham found his Water role, as a devotee to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, relatively straightforward. “In India, everyone knows the teachings of Gandhi and what his struggles were about. I’m also a romantic at heart so being an idealist and falling in love, those things weren’t hard to connect with. What I had to concentrate on is what I wore: I tend to dress very casually. I had to change how I walked in the costumes. Deepa had to remind me before every shot to drop my shoulders. “You’re not walking on the runway!” she’d say to me. There were no gyms in that time, so I had to relax that. I could feel my gait changing as we did the film.”

Abraham says he is recognized quite frequently on the streets in India, and abroad. “I was on board a flight recently and the Afghani woman sitting next to me had seen all of my films. She knew what my favourite colour was, which I found funny. In Bombay, my hometown, people tend to leave you alone though, as there are a lot of film actors who live there.”

Abraham is pleased that the situation in India appears to be improving so rapidly. “We have an amazing government right now, and the stock market is rising. There is still a lot of suffering in India though—we need to keep our minds on the poverty that continues to exist.”

Still, he is amazed by the ignorance many in the West have about his native country. “One journalist here asked me if we have patios like this in India. I barely knew what to say to him.”

Water opens Friday, Nov. 11

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