Bollywood usually celebrates glamour, success, and box-office numbers, however behind the highlight lie struggles that hardly ever make it into public conversations. In an unique interview with ETimes, Alexx O’Nell—an American-born actor and musician who has constructed a prolific, almost two-decade-long profession throughout Indian cinema in languages together with Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, and Malayalam—speaks candidly about loneliness, judgment, silence, and the structural modifications he believes could make the movie business more healthy for the subsequent technology.
What’s one silent battle in Bollywood that everybody faces, however virtually nobody talks about overtly?
Loneliness.It sounds ironic in an business full of individuals, noise, and fixed collaboration—nevertheless it’s deeply actual. You’re surrounded by crews, producers, co-actors, publicity groups… but emotionally, many artists are fully on their very own.For outsiders particularly, that feeling is amplified. I’ve constructed my life in India, labored throughout industries and languages, and immediately I’m lucky to be probably the most prolific non-Indian actor working right here, with seven theatrical releases in 2025 alone throughout Malayalam, Hindi, English, and Bengali. However success doesn’t make loneliness magically disappear.There’s a quiet stress to at all times look assured, busy, and “successful.” No person desires to confess how isolating uncertainty can really feel when your profession will depend on forces you’ll be able to’t management. Household and mates usually don’t perceive the business—its stresses, slights, and injustices—however fortunately, I’ve a spectacular supervisor, Shreeda, who does. She usually “talks me off the ledge,” reminding me that even within the chaos, I’m not alone. Truthfully, everybody wants a Shreeda to maintain them sane and grounded on this enterprise.
At any level in your journey, did staying silent really feel safer than talking your reality?
Completely—many, many occasions.Whenever you’re constructing a profession, particularly as a foreigner in Indian cinema, you shortly study that being “simple to work with” is usually valued greater than being trustworthy. Talking up can really feel dangerous—you are concerned it’d label you as tough, ungrateful, or replaceable.Early on, I swallowed loads—confusion, cultural misunderstandings, even unfair therapy—as a result of I assumed survival trusted silence.It took years, and a few stability, to understand that silence might shield your job within the brief time period, however not talking up when it issues slowly erodes your self-respect. Discovering your voice is horrifying, however shedding it’s worse. The true problem is figuring out when to talk, and having a powerful supervisor or mentor to information you—that can assist you do it respectfully and productively, with out burning bridges—is invaluable.
How has fixed judgment—field workplace numbers, social media, relevance—affected you emotionally?
You are feeling it.We wish to fake numbers don’t matter, however they do. They quietly resolve whether or not you’re thought-about “scorching,” “completed,” or “bankable.” Add social media to that, and all of a sudden hundreds of thousands of strangers are reviewing not simply your work, however your face, your accent, and your value.Even now—after performing in English, Hindi, and this yr in Bengali for the primary time—there are days once I catch myself equating my success with opinions or box-office collections. I really feel extremely grateful that every one my 2025 releases like Lucifer 2: Empuraan, Kesari Chapter 2, Phule, Pokkhirajer Dim, Raghu Dakat, Devi Chowdhurani, and Thamma have linked with audiences in a giant method. However gratitude and stress usually coexist.Music saved me in some ways. Writing songs, being a musician, gave me a non-public house the place I may fall in love with a melody earlier than anybody else had an opinion about it—one thing pure that I used to be excited to share with the world. However even there, downloads, streams, and radio play shortly develop into one other scoreboard, one other method of measuring how “profitable” your honesty was.Artwork isn’t meant to be a contest. But the stress created by statistics by no means absolutely disappears. It’s a double-edged sword—they provide perception into who’s listening and the place the work is touchdown—however they will additionally distort your sense of self.In time, you study to make use of the numbers with out letting them outline your journey, your concept of success, or your inventive value.
What emotional assist do you want existed on movie units whenever you had been beginning out?
Mentorship.The movie business is totally completely different from the way it appears to be like from the skin. It’s lengthy hours of ready, sudden chaos, and months of preparation that may come right down to a single take. Early on, I want somebody had merely guided me—and reassured me that the confusion was regular.Whenever you’re new, particularly coming from one other nation and dealing in a number of languages, you assume everybody else understands the principles, the politics, the unstated expectations. So whenever you really feel misplaced, you flip it inward and blame your self.I might have beloved a easy tradition of mentorship on units. Nothing formal or company—simply senior actors or crew members taking 5 minutes to say, “This business is unusual for all of us. You’re not failing. You’re studying.”That type of reassurance can change the whole lot. It offers you the energy to maintain happening the times you doubt your ability, your expertise, your selections, or your house within the room.
Should you may change only one factor to make Bollywood more healthy for the subsequent technology, what would that reform be?
I might reconnect cinema to theatre.Theatre is the place humility, self-discipline, and emotional honesty are realized. It teaches you to respect the craft earlier than chasing the digicam. However immediately, theatre is handled like a interest, not a basis.If Bollywood genuinely invested in theatre—funding it, casting from it, respecting it—we’d resolve a number of issues directly: entitlement would shrink, preparation would deepen, and alternatives could be earned by way of potential, not lineage.I come from a efficiency background, 10 years of theater, the place you earn your house night time after night time in entrance of a dwell viewers. That grounding helped me survive being an outsider in India, studying new languages, new cultures, and now working throughout Hindi, Malayalam, and Bengali cinema with seven theatrical releases in 2025. When actors develop by way of theatre, they arrive on set much less fragile, much less insecure, and extra beneficiant as collaborators.A more healthy business begins not in casting places of work—however on small phases, with actual folks watching you breathe and fail and develop in actual time.