AFGHAN LUKE directed by Mike Clattenburg, written by Douglas Bell, Barrie Dunn and Patrick Graham, with Nick Stahl, Nicolas Wright, Stephen Lobo and Vik Sahay. An Alliance release. 97 minutes. Opens Friday (September 23). See listing.
Vik Sahay is not the star of afghan Luke. The movie sees his character, Imran Sahar, as an antagonistic, one-note rival for Nick Stahl’s hard-bitten journalist he’s the jerk who’s competing with Stahl’s Luke for a war-crimes story about a Canadian sniper who’s taking trophies from his kills.
But as I watched Mike Clattenburg’s movie (which I didn’t like, as you’ll see if you read the review), I noticed that Sahay was playing the character not as the aggressive ass the film wants him to be, but as a decent human being whose conduct is morally and ethically respectable throughout. His only mistake is that he puts his trust in the wrong people. It’s an interesting performance in a movie that doesn’t know what to do with it.
“It was never my intention to be a smarmy villain,” he says when we sit down in the lobby of the downtown Intercontinental Hotel early in this year’s Toronto Film Festival. “I wanted to play a guy who was ambition personified, and I wanted him to be simply driven. That was my goal that’s what I wanted to put out there. I wanted to be a guy who goes, ‘Good luck. I’m going after the same story, let’s see what happens.'”
To figure out the character, Sahay talked to war journalists and got a sense of the personality type that’s drawn to combat situations.
“Generally, these guys are a kind of narcissistic, ambitious, self-serving, myopic group [who] just want what they want,” he says. “There were a couple of brown-skinned reporters, and they said, ‘We grow our hair long, we learn the language better, we pretend to be more religious than we are.’ Is that goal noble, or is there something really dirty about that? They would speak about it very clearly: ‘Our goal is to get that story.’ And that’s [how] I wanted my guy to be.”
A veteran character actor, the Ottawa-born Sahay is probably best known for his role as the obnoxious Lester Patel on the NBC series Chuck. He’s also appeared in Richie Mehta’s Amal and the Roxy Hunter movie series, and he’ll be seen next year in American Reunion.
Once Chuck’s final season wraps, Sahay is keen to pursue more film work.
“I’m most comfortable as an actor being kind of immersed,” he says. “Get as subjective as possible, stay there for the two or three months we’re shooting, and then emerge. [In] TV, there’s a social aspect, a collaborative aspect. You know, you gotta love humans. There are so many humans around, all the time.”
Interview Clips
Vik Sahay on joining the cast of American Reunion:
Sahay on the ups and downs of Chuck:
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