Money Heist (La casa de papel in Spanish), the most loved and most-watched non-English series on Netflix, has fans all over the world.
The fandom for the phenomenal heist drama is so crazy that five days after the release of the fourth season, the Malayalam subtitles were released for the ‘Money Heist maniacs’ in Kerala.
The fourth season had introduced a new set of characters, Pakistani hackers helping the Professor to carry out the heist; one of them was played by an Indian actor, Ajay Jethi.
Still pinching himself to witness the love and fan following for Money Heist, Ajay considers the character Shakir as his life-defining role.
“I have been acting in Spanish movies, plays, series, advertisements and short films for over a decade and I have never seen such a global response to any of my works like Money Heist. It’s so overwhelming,” says the 38-year-old actor, who spoke from Barcelona, where he has been working as an actor and a film distributor of Hindi and Punjabi films in Spain and Portugal.
Hailing from Khatiwala, a village in Patiala, Punjab, Ajay’s life story is worth a biography film.
His parents – government employee Ishwar Das and teacher Indira Kumari, wanted their son to study well and earn a job, but Ajay’s dreams lay elsewhere.
“I wanted to be an actor. During my graduation days, I joined an amateur theatre group named Natakwala and started acting in plays. Together, we brought out Punjabi plays based on the works of Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht and Arthur Miller. We acted in the Punjabi version of Swadesh Deepak’s Court Martial. Our dream was to become professional actors,” he recalls.
But Ajay’s father, unhappy over his son’s decision to discontinue his studies to pursue acting, planned to send him over to Spain to a friend who would help him find a job and settle. “I arrived in Spain in 2005 on a work visa and since then, worked as a construction labourer for a year. I then shifted to a factory job and using the money from there, I took Spanish language lessons and acting classes,” says Ajay.
His theatre coach, Professor Sylvia de la Rosa, went on to become his mentor, girlfriend and later, his wife.
“It was she who introduced me to casting director Luci Lenox, who cast me as Elil in the mini-series Alakrana and later, in Spanish movies,” adds Ajay, who went on to act in several movies, series and ads, one of them in which he acted alongside Gerard Butler.
With Sylvia, now his ex-wife, he has a 10-year-old daughter Fiona.
Ajay has meanwhile, acted in supporting roles in a handful of Punjabi movies and keeps shuttling between India and Spain distributing movies from his homeland at his second homeland.
Money Heist, he says, happened out of the blue.
“I had worked with Money Heist director Álex Pina earlier and when he informed me about the role, I had no idea about the series. I sat down to watch it and in three days, I finished the two seasons. There was no way I was going to give it a miss. The shooting happened in Madrid. I didn’t get to meet the rest of the cast and I was not sure if my role would make it to the final cut. I didn’t even tell anyone that I was acting in Money Heist. But it turned out amazing, and I knew that it worked from the trolls, messages and photos crowding my Instagram and Twitter handles,” says Ajay, who hopes that OTT platforms would take Latin American film industry a household name in India.
The Punjabi man is keeping his fingers crossed for his Bollywood entry and of course, season 5 of Money Heist!
