Being Osama bin Laden

If I had known that my nostrils poking out of a body bag would be the main feature of my performance in Kathryn Bigelow's film Zero Dark Thirty, it would have saved me eight weeks of heart palpitations as I prepared for my role as Osama bin Laden. How does one play the global face of evil? My journey to becoming bin Laden started in March of last year, when I got a call from a casting director in London, who said she had been trying to get hold of me for a week — apparently the phone number I had registered on the Spotlight database, an online resource used to contact actors, was an old one. I apologised. She asked if I could come in the next day. I said yes, what for? She said she couldn't tell me.

The next week, I was offered the part of the world's most notorious terrorist. My first reaction was an expletive that cannot be printed here. I am a 29-year-old native Londoner, a moderate Sikh with a drama degree from Royal Holloway, University of London — a pretty far cry from a 54-year-old Saudi multimillionaire-turned-terrorist who had been on the lam for nearly a decade. I guess I do look a bit like bin Laden — I am 6 feet 4 inches tall, about what he was. I have brown skin and a prominent nose, but it's not as though anyone has ever stopped me in the street and shouted, "Hey, aren't you bin Laden?"

It's not that easy to be an actor of Asian ancestry in Britain or America. There are fewer leading roles for us, but then again, there are also probably fewer of us going up for those roles. Of course, the problems of Asian actors can't be compared with the suffering of both Sikhs and Muslims who have been targeted and killed in hate crimes.

I started taking acting seriously when I joined the National Youth Theatre at 17 years old. Before Zero Dark Thirty, I didn't have much experience in film. I did, however, have some prior experience playing faces of terror. In the 2010 British comedy film The Infidel, I played Hazeem — a henchman of a character loosely based on Abu Hamza al-Masri, the hook-handed Islamist preacher who was captured in Britain

in 2004 and extradited last year to the United States. I guess playing bin Laden was a natural progression, a graduation through the ranks of terrorists.

To prepare myself for the task, my friend Tara, who works for the Institute of Ismaili Studies, gave me a list of books to read about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. I bought a set of Rosetta Stone CDs to

learn some basic Arabic.And then I tackled my weight. In the movies, after all, image is everything, and I was playing a very ill, thin man. Bin Laden reportedly lived on an ascetic diet of dates and yogurt. While on vacation in Jamaica, my friend Henry, a personal trainer, had me running up hills in the morning heat and eating only eggs, lean meat and fish to become a waif of bin Laden's ilk.

Even after all this preparation, I was still nervous when I arrived last May on the Zero Dark Thirty set in Jordan. Playing a dead person was more difficult than I'd imagined. And being dumped into a body bag was certainly not as fun as having, say, an onscreen snog, but being carried in it was kind of reminiscent of being in a hammock. I got so comfortable in the bag that, by the end of the shoot, I was known as Osama bin Loungin'. Other than what I'd seen in YouTube videos, I didn't have much to go on when it came to playing bin Laden in his last moments. I remembered the advice a director friend gave me: for the most honest portrayal, forget your perception of the politics and focus on the character's basic motivation in that point in time.

In the film, you see only a shadow just before my character is — spoiler alert — killed. During the sequence in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, as the actors playing Navy SEALs stormed our eerily realistic set, we had shot some options showing him moving around. Because of how enigmatic he was, I had the freedom to play on what I had decided for myself would be his state of mind and body. I wasn't thinking, "Bin Laden wouldn't stand up or walk like this," because, after so many years of house arrest, who knows how he carried himself?

The controversial movie has been a resounding success. I have returned to my normal life in London. The make-up and fake blood are gone, and my career's been picking up somewhat. But would I be prepared to play a universally despised emblem of evil again? I guess it would depend on how many lines I had.

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