British actor Prasana Poanarajah has had a hit with the starring role in the new season of ‘The Crown’, and his directorial debut ‘Ballywalter’ kicked off his festive journey with the opening of the Belfast Film Festival.
Puwanarajah is of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage and has used aspects of his background to report on his role in “The Crown” and his role in directing “Ballywalter,” he says. diverse.
In The Crown, Puwanarajah plays British journalist Martin Bashir, who gave the infamous and now infamous “Panorama” interview in 1995 with the BBC with Princess Diana. Al-Bashir is of Pakistani descent.
“It’s very rare for you as an actor to use the full range of your physical, spiritual, and heritage offerings—particularly the way casting can happen, where you can feel totally last minute and variety can feel,” says Riz Ahmed, an optional add-on, where people don’t look really down to the reality of a person’s heritage – they just look at the skin, or something else, like sex or gender,” says Poanarajah.
“It was something very unusual for me to play a brown person, you know is brown to your bones,” Banarajah adds. “And it wasn’t really about being Martin Bashir, it was actually just about being a person where I came from.”
Bwanrajah says he appreciates being “very heritage aware”.
“It was someone of South Asian descent, he says on the programme, working for an institution, the BBC, which, for anyone, even for my parents who worked on the NHS [National Heath Service]And the [you felt] The pressures of movement in those spaces of that era. And I don’t think those things have changed significantly, unfortunately. I still feel this pressure. If you don’t have access to these things, if you only know that these things are facts, as an actor they are really valuable, because you invent less. And once you start creating less, you get closer to what it would be like to portray some kind of reality.”
To prepare it, in addition to learning the script and physical labor required for the role, Bwanrajah conducted extensive research to get to know Al Bashir as a journalist away from “Panorama”. He also examined the motives behind al-Bashir’s actions – al-Bashir falsified bank statements to gain access to Diana – without taking an ethical stance on them.
Puwanarajah was also well aware of what he described as a “massive compendium” of public record information about Bashir, something the actor cannot access in most cases, and he found the process equal parts interesting and challenging.
“There’s a lot to work through and try to understand. But really, it’s also about playing the scenes – you’re not playing a whole life in a given moment, you’re just playing a moment. So the moment the software films it creating bank statements is really, in an instant. Playing, a pair of people prepare a document,” says Bwanarajah. “I think it’s important to know why you’re doing acting, and this was about taking on a bunch of challenges.”
In terms of directing, Puwanarajah has previously directed some short films. Written by Stacey Gregg who also wrote “Ballywalter” his short film “Spoof or Die” for Channel 4’s Coming Up strand. Set in the village of Ballwalter and Belfast, Northern Ireland, the film follows two affected people who find an unexpected connection. When Poanarajah began visiting Belfast to develop a range of projects with Greg, he felt “a strange sense of familiarity”.
“I realized there was a resonance in terms of the post-conflict narratives, how I grew up as a person of Sri Lankan Tamil heritage in the UK, and how, similarly, we have complex journeys and routes through that in terms of how we talk about it,” says Poanarajah.
“I felt this reluctance with which I agreed,” he adds. “So in fact, it made perfect sense to make an advantage on people in Belfast navigating loneliness, mental health challenges, and isolation through the lens of humor and the kind of reflection that people so cleverly ignore, which is a very important thing for Sri Lankan Tamils as well.”
Puwanarajah is currently filming the ITV crime drama “Payback” which was produced by “Line of Duty” creator Jade Mercurio. He is also working with Mercurio on the adaptation of Rachel Clark’s bestselling film Breathtaking.
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