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There's a simple formula for success in Hollywood - move here, get a break, and find yourself walking down a red carpet. For actor Sonny Mandal, that equation sums it all up nicely. There is, of course, much more to it than that, but no one cares to see an athlete train until he wins the gold. What matters are results;
and in his feature film debut, "He delivers", says Director Kavi Raz of
Mandal.
When Raz set out to make his first feature film, The Gold
Bracelet, he was
sure about one thing - no one else outside the news media was tackling the
story's subject matter. Based on true events following September 11th, it
was original. So it only made sense that all elements of the film making
process remained original. That also meant breaking casting stereotypes.
After months of arduous auditioning across the U.S., Raz found who he was
looking for, actor Sonny Mandal.
In the film, which screened to a private audience on January 28th at The
Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Mandal plays Bobby Dhillon, a
whiz-kid computer major who has fallen hard for the girl of his dreams.
Strangely, Mandal is not usually cast as the goofy-tech-geek type, but in
this case breaking the rules was the rule. Bobby Dhillon is a guy who
represents all Americans because he gets back on his feet when knocked
down. After 9/11, that is what we did as citizens and as a nation. Every
good story reveals the individual struggles of its characters; and Bobby
Dhillon, as portrayed by Mandal, reveals many of our own struggles.
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