Abhishek Rao comes from a filmy family - with mother/actress Mamatha Rao, followed by his sister Rakshita and brother-in-law, Prem. Now he will soon enter tinsel town with a Prem directorial. Meanwhile Abhishek is gaining some valua ble experience in the movie industry by assisting the director on sets of The Villain, and also getting some tips from none other than Shivarajkumar and Sudeep.
City Express gets a confirmation on this from none other than his sister, who is happy about her brother’s debut. She tells us that Abhishek went to acting school at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York, and is currently learning how to do fight and dance sequences. “He is learning the required skills to face the camera. From whatever I’ve heard from the sets of The Villain, Abhishek is practising Sudeep’s lines in the movie. Sudeep himself is seeing how Abhi is keeping up. It’s strange, but it is definitely helping him gauge his acting skills.”
When Abhishek decided to change his career track, he got a lot of support from his family, says Rakshita. “It’s Abhi’s wish to get into acting, and he has support from all of us. He did extremely well in his engineering. He wasn’t a mediocre student and passed with distinction. We wanted him to do his MBA abroad like his friends, but instead, he wanted to learn acting. You don’t get admission into Lee Strasberg Institute unless someone from the family is in the film industry already,” she says.
She adds, “He chose to go to this institute because Ranbir Kapoor went there.” This is also the same institute Al Pacino attended.
Abhishek is having a great time assisting Prem on the sets of The Villain. “It’s an amazing experiece, and I’m getting to learn a lot from superb actors such as Shivarajkumar and Sudeep,” he says.
With guidance from his sister, who is a south Indian actor, director Prem, and moreover, learning from actors, we hope to see Abhishek rise.