Two Swedes on how to break into Bollywood

These business school grads have traded Sweden's famed 6-hour workday for the uncertainty (and hilarity) of a career as Bollywood extras - and are loving it

'Beecy' is what 'busy' sounds like when two struggling actors from Andheri describe their current schedule. But then, their real accent has yet to make it into Hindi films and TV where these Swedish men have played everything but Swedish men.

Over the last nine months on screens big and small, Johan Bartoli (26) and Hampus Bergqvist (25) have morphed into German engineers, Russian hippies, generic white badminton referees and the recurring Bollywood favourite - British officers. Yet this golden-haired, light-eyed duo from Stockholm refuses to call the Indian entertainment industry, racist. "It is massive and chaotic but somehow it works," says Bartoli, who uses the same line to describe his new home, Mumbai.

It was the lure of this crazy energy that made these best friends and business school graduates leave the "calm, structured" city of Stockholm and book a one-way ticket to Mumbai last September. "We didn't want to become bankers," says Bartoli. While the Swedish film industry is slowly churning out globally acclaimed films and actors like Alexander Skarsgard who plays the new Tarzan, it is still a tiny, slow factory compared to its speedy, giant counterpart.
File photo of Johan Bartoli (26) and Hampus Bergqvist (25).

"Bollywood was like this crazy, exciting mystery to us," says Bartoli, who had seen a few films like DDLJ and wanted to try his luck there. In this alien city, the marketing principles they learnt in school perhaps came in handy where they built contacts by approaching strangers on the street with their story. It paid off.

Now, close to a year and the duo -who recently played Spanish bounty hunters in a Bengali movie -don't have to make calls to land auditions anymore. "My mother is now worried that I am never coming back," says Bartoli, who is sitting in his socks inside the sparselydecorated flat in Andheri that he shares with Bergqvist and Pratap, a moustachioed actor who serves not only as their Bollywood knowledge bank but as something of a wingman. "When I go to pubs with them, no one looks at me," complains Pratap.

But then, their fair skin isn't always their friend in Mumbai. Once, after paying their deposit, the trio had moved with bag and baggage to a flat in Andheri but when the owner realised they were foreigners, he refused to let them move in. Before this, when they would look to move in somewhere as paying guests, "we were told we can't bring people home or host parties," recalls Bartoli, who hates being hemmed in by rules.

Their spunky sense of humour though has helped the flatmates translate their misery into kitschy material for '2foreignersinBollywood' " a Facebook page with photos and videos that have turned them into viral sensations. Berqvist, for instance, recently borrowed an auto and pretended to be a driver who rejects a passenger in Hindi. For another video, Bartoli spilt coffee on a shirt, then wore this short, ill-fitting shirt with flared pants, inverted a plastic bag over his golden hair and pushed a vegetable cart along an Andheri street, shouting names of vegetables in credible Hindi. The result was utter confusion. "A lady thought he was an Indian afflicted with albinism," says Pratap. Bartoli, who is brushing up his Hindi, takes this as a compliment.


They navigate Mumbai with the same ardency they attack auditions.During their first month here, for instance, they would take the local train and get off at whichever station's name caught their fancy. "We loved it but later, when we told locals about it, they said that was a red light area," says Bartoli, referring to Kamathipura.