Agastya Nanda, grandson of Amitabh Bachchan, is making an interesting debut in the film industry. He is part of director Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies, a reimagining of the classic Archie Comics, where the characters are placed in Riverdale- only this time it’s a fictional Anglo-Indian hill station in 1964.
The coming-of-age musical follows the lives of the town’s most famous teenagers- Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, Ethel, and Dilton- and Agastya has bagged the much-coveted role of Archie. Part of the entire gang are also two other star kids who are making their debuts- Khushi Kapoor (daughter of Sridevi and younger sister of Janhvi Kapoor) as Betty Cooper and Suhana Khan (daughter of Shah Rukh Khan) as Veronica Lodge.
The 22-year-old Agastya remembers that the first time he saw a film set was when he shot an ad for his father’s company with his sister, entrepreneur Navya Naveli Nanda in their father’s factory. But did he always want to be an actor or was it something more recent?
“I always thought I would be a businessman, I was very against wanting to be an actor, as I wanted to be different from what people expected me to be. But now here I am,” Agastya says candidly, as he did when we asked him how he got the role of Archie Andrews. “I auditioned for it. I hope I didn’t let Zoya down.”
He has also bagged his second movie, even before the first has released, where he shall be portraying war martyr Arun Khetarpal in Ekkis, to be directed by Sriram Raghavan. “Playing Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal feels like an enormous responsibility. I want to work hard to make the Indian Army proud,” Agastya told us.
An Archies adaptation and a war movie- definitely good choices to start off his career with we feel.
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