Sitting at a booth in Soho Theatre’s cafe on a Thursday morning, actor Jassa Ahluwalia tells the story of being out for dinner when he received an email about a job that felt like his ‘Hollywood moment’.
‘It seemed that everything that I’d been working towards was coming to fruition. The universe had beautifully conspired to land this perfect role in my lap,’ the 34-year-old tells Metro.
Pulling out his phone and opening his inbox, he leans forward to read the message out loud: ‘Character breakdown – this is a large supporting character. Note: It is crucial to the narrative and the character’s story arc that Brooke is convincingly accepted in aristocratic circles as white British. The character is currently written as having Indian heritage on his mother’s side.’
‘They were describing me,’ he recalls.
Born to a white English mum and a brown Punjabi dad in 1990, Jassa couldn’t believe his luck that the TV pirate series, Sandokan, set in South Asia, was being made and he had a chance to play the role of Lord James Brooke.
‘It felt like the acting industry was listening, paying attention and caring,’ he remembers, his eyes widening at the memory.
His self-tape — a short video where Jassa spoke about his heritage and read lines — led to an invitation for a screen test, and in November 2023, Jassa made his way to Bang Studios, just a stone’s throw from where he sits today. ‘Even just talking about it, my stomach’s remembering the emotion. I was tingling, I was so alive,’ the actor says.
‘It sounds ridiculous, but I was trying to find ways to stay grounded. They had a miniature Buddha with a little tea light in the loo. I had a moment with it, touching its feet while thinking of how far I’d come to get to where I was. I was saying “Thank you”.’
After hair and makeup, Jassa was guided to a room filled with casting directors and producers, all crowded behind a desk with monitors. Over 30 minutes, he performed a scene under lights and cameras, partly in Punjabi, which was, he says, requested by the room.
As the meeting ended with hugs, the word ‘perfect’ was lobbed around, and Jassa felt things couldn’t have gone any better.
However, on December 15, he got a rejection email. It praised ‘utterly wonderful’ Jassa for his ‘beautiful work’, but told him they weren’t going to be progressing with him. When Jassa asked for more detailed feedback, he says he was told there was ‘nothing constructive to pass on’.
‘It was heartbreaking. I didn’t know how it was possible to nail it so hard and still not get the gig,’ he admits.
As an actor since his teens, Jassa was accustomed to the rejection process, so he picked himself up and moved on. That was, until he read in the press a few months later that the role he had auditioned for — Lord James Brooke — had been given to Gossip Girl star Ed Westwick. It was ‘like a slap in the face’, remembers Jassa.
‘They wanted the guy from Gossip Girl that people knew, and all that specificity and vulnerability that I shared didn’t count for anything. The whole experience made me feel unimportant – my mix was just a tick box for a second, but it wasn’t actually important.
‘A little bit of my love for the industry died at that moment. I thought, “F**k this, why am I pouring my heart and soul into this business?”’
What is Sandokan about?
Sandokan is a reboot of an Italian TV series that aired in 1976 and was sold to 85 countries. Fremantle-owned Lux Vide is now putting a new spin on it with Can Yaman taking the lead role. It will air on the Italian state broadcaster RAI and be distributed worldwide.
Set in the mid-19th century on the island of Borneo, the native Dayak tribes are dominated by ruthless Brits. Sandokan doesn’t initially pick a side, but when he marries the daughter of the British consul, Marianne (Alanah Bloor), he begins to fight against colonial powers with his motley crew. The synopsis teases that pirate hunter Lord James Brooke (Ed Westwick) ‘will stop at nothing to capture Sandokan and win Marianne’s heart.’
Angeliqa Devi, who is Bengali, has been announced as playing Brooke’s mother, Hita. Jassa says that ‘unless there’s been a radical change to the script’ Ed’s character is still mixed. To Jassa’s knowledge, an important part of the plot is that people are made to believe that Hita is a servant, not Brooke’s parent.
Desire for acceptance
The rejection felt extra painful, admits Jassa, because he struggled with an ‘obsessive desperation’ to succeed due to a complex relationship with his mixed identity.
‘It’s no coincidence that I associate performing with a feeling of belonging because of an early happy memory I have of dancing Bhangra as a kid on the streets in India,’ he explains with a smile, showing a photo from the trip. ‘I was always unconsciously trying to get back to that.’
Jassa studied at a subsidised arts program in Leicestershire throughout his school years, which made him feel that an acting career was ‘tangibly achievable.’ His youthful optimism felt well-placed when he landed a role on the BBC coming-of-age series Some Girls, playing lovable bad boy Rocky in 2012.
‘I had a few years of things snowballing with parts in Casualty, Peaky Blinders, Ripper Street and The Whale. I was around a crowd of people, like John Boyega and David Gyasi, who were bubbling then blowing up. I thought it was going to happen for me, and then… it didn’t.
‘There had been a shift in the industry towards trying to tell more representative stories, but my voice wasn’t welcome in that conversation,’ he says of the 2010s. ‘It was surface-level, productions just wanted to look diverse.’
Mixed feelings
Jassa became increasingly frustrated with a landscape where the role of mixed-race characters felt more like an exercise rather than a thoughtful process, despite being the fastest-growing demographic in the UK. He cites one episode of Line of Duty where they say one of the suspects is mixed race [in the opener of season five, Vihaan Malhotra is asked to describe the woman who has been blackmailing him], ‘but they don’t say what mix, but everyone is like “cool, understood”.’
In 2019, Jassa felt a desire to take action after a follower responded to a video of him speaking Punjabi on social media, expressing shock at his fluency due to him being ‘only half’. The actor quickly replied that he was ‘both, not half’, which went on to become a popular hashtag, as well as a TEDx Talk, documentary, and a book deal.
As he grew more vocal, Jassa also became increasingly keen to incorporate his heritage into his acting.
‘I wanted to bring my Punjabi-ness to work, because for years it felt like it was going to limit me,’ he explains. ‘It wasn’t somebody explicitly sitting me down and saying, “You should never talk about your Punjabi heritage”, but the little signals I got were that to get ahead, you need to conform as much as you possibly can.’
When asked what needs to change to strip these attitudes, Jassa — who is a member of Equity, the UK’s trade union for the performing arts and entertainment industries — has a list ready and reaches into his rucksack to pull out a notebook filled with pages of scribbles. Although, he barely needs to glance at them: equality, finances, and intention need to be addressed, he explains.
‘In any recruitment process, you expect people to be treated the same. I was asked in my audition to riff in Punjabi. Was Ed Westwick asked to do that?’
Moving to his next point, he says: ‘It all comes down to money. We’re living in a time where the arts are increasingly under attack, so people in power are making safer choices, which uphold what has gone before.
‘We’re not getting any radical shift forward in this climate, so audiences are being deprived of incredible, world-changing, creative work from talented people who need to prioritise feeding their families, so leave the industry.
‘Ed’s involvement was probably a lot easier to justify to the finance team than mine, but we need to be thinking of why we are telling stories. Is it a white presenting mixed character for exotic dramatic intrigue, or because they are exploring an underrepresented part of history with sensitivity and authenticity?’
As Jassa gets more passionate in his point-making, his voice shakes, and the actor admits: ‘I find it hard to balance my personal emotions with my rational union brain.’
Hopeful future
However, the reason behind it all is simple, he adds: ‘These stories should be told because we should be reflecting the society we live in, so everyone feels seen.’
As for Jassa himself, he’s in a happy place and is focused on writing more books, spreading his message further to challenge misconceptions and making changes through his role in the union. As he gets set to cycle off to his next engagement, he says: ‘Now that I feel I have found a sense of home within myself, I’m not craving it as much from performance.
‘I am no longer content to quietly pass as white, I want to assert my Punjabi heritage. I want mixed people on screen as they are, not as ethnically ambiguous shapeshifters.
‘Being a chameleon is part of the joy of being an actor, but I want to play with my true colours.’
Metro has contacted Fremantle’s Lux Vide for comment. Follow Jassa on Instagram here.
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