DESIBLOG is pleased to report that the upcoming James Bond Film Casino Royale, starring Daniel Craig as 007, will be including at least one brown actor on the cast, no not Aishwarya Rai, but Bollywood-villain Gulshan Grover. Grover, true to form, will be playing Le Chiffre, the villain, in Casino Royale, which is based on Ian Fleming's first James Bond book by the same name.

Shooting for the Bond film is due to begin in Prague in February 2006. Grover will be the first Indian to act in a Bond film since tennis star Vijay Amritraj and Kabir Bedi played important roles in Octopussy (1983). [link]

If I recall correctly Octopussy had many scenes filmed at the lovely Lake Palace, located on Lake Pichola in Udaipur (now a Taj-palace hotel).

Upon doing some research I was pretty amazed to find out that Grover has done (and is in the process of doing) several non Bollywood films, including Beeper, a thriller starring Harvey Keitel, Kaizad Gustad's really bad film Boom which had a really attractive cast including Padma Lakshmi, member of Salman Rushdie's posse, the forthcoming My Bollywood Bride, the Salman Khan starrer Marigold, and Tarsem Singh's The Fall.

posted by sajit @ 10:35 PM