Goofing around like Arjun Kapoor

The Ki & Ka actor on dubbing for Ice Age: Collision Course and shooting for Half Girlfriend.
Goofing around like Arjun Kapoor

The Ki & Ka actor on dubbing for Ice Age: Collision Course and shooting for Half Girlfriend.

Arjun Kapoor, who is currently shooting for Mohit Suri’s Half Girlfriend, says that the most challenging part about lending his voice  for the Hindi version of the Ice Age: Collision Course, the franchise’s latest outing, was doing “a high energy character” like Buck. Kapoor will be making his voice-over debut with the fifth film of the series, which has Scrat (the squirrel) activating a UFO by accident, causing it to blast off into space and inadvertently  sending  a huge  asteroid hurtling   towards Earth. The plot revolves around the herd coming up with various (read crazy and humorous) ideas to stop it

‘Buck’ing UP
“The character is pretty out there. He is larger than life and full of fun. He is a little goofy, too, a little over-intelligent and over-smart, but still a kind-hearted soul,” says Kapoor, describing the one-eyed weasel whom he also terms as “very Hindi film hero-esque”. To play the British-Australian character—first introduced to us in Ice Age: The Dawn of Dinosaurs (2009)— Kapoor has picked up Gujarati and Hyderabadi accents and even imitates certain characters. Talking about whether Buck bears any resemblance to him, he says that the character is not similar to him and that’s what was  fun about the experience. “He is so different from me that’s why I enjoyed playing him,” says the 31-year-old, who now joins the likes of Sonakshi Sinha, Priyanka Chopra  and Irrfan Khan, who have also lent their voices to animation films. Experimenting with different voices along the way, Kapoor also imitated his uncle Anil Kapoor with his trademark jhakaas, along with doing imitations of Munnabhai (Sanjay Dutt) and Circuit (Arshad Warsi).

Changing Gears
Kapoor is currently filming for the movie adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s Half Girlfriend. Although he admits to not having read the book, he says a lot of work has gone into perfecting the accent and dialect of his character, who hails from a village in Bihar. “I am also spending time with people from Bihar to understand how they live, how they are, what their thought processes are, and what the culture is like. We did workshops in Mumbai, with a lot of actors who hail from Bihar and that kind of helped me get the accent,” says Kapoor, who also had to learn basketball since his character plays the sport. “Thankfully I had played it in school, so it came in handy,” he says. This is the first time that Kapoor will be working with director Mohit Suri. “I have always wanted to work with him. I think we have come together for the correct film. It’s truly going to be a different film for him and me,” he says. Other directors on Kapoor’s wishlist include Imtiaz Ali, Farhan Akhtar, Zoya Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Rajkumar Hirani, Rohit  Shetty and Ayan Mukherjee, among others.


Ice Age: Collision Course releases on July 15

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