'Million Dollar Arm' actors had to learn baseball quickly
The film is the true story of two kids from India, Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, who won a television contest as the hardest throwers in their country, and their journey to the United States to become baseball players. Hamm plays J.B. Bernstein, the sports agent who came up with the whole idea, made the reality show in India happen, and then housed Singh and Patel as they worked with pitching coach Tom House on the USC campus.
We ran our conversation with Hamm a few days after the set visit, and over the next few weeks leading up to the release of the movie, we'll give you Q&As with the film's primary actors, as well as conversations with the real-life subjects of the movie.
Today, it's Suraj Sharma ("Life of Pi") and Madhur Mittal ("Slumdog Millionaire"), the actors who played Singh and Patel, respectively. We chatted at the near the end of the long day of filming, plopped down on the concrete in a tunnel leading to the first-base dugout. As you'll soon see, this is much more of a conversation between the two actors than a Q&A, considering I had only the opportunity to break up their banter with questions a few times.
SPORTING NEWS: What was it like, the experience of learning to play baseball?
SHARMA: Well, see, we didn't know anything about baseball initially, so Mike (Ribaudo, their pitching coach for the movie), the baseball department, they came over with some of the coaches, and Dinesh was with us training. Initially it was strange because I wasn't getting the ball right and I wasn't throwing it straight. It wasn't hard. It used to go like that (uses his hands to show a looping arc), was more of a lob. It was pretty bad in the beginning. We didn't know any of the rules. We literally didn't know anything. I just found out who Jackie Robinson is, so it's literally like that, we didn't know anything. Slowly, watching Dinesh pitching, the coaches pitching, it helped, and actually watching Madhur pitch, because when he started off, he was killing it, right from the beginning.
MITTAL: He's just being nice. Stop kissing my ass.
SHARMA: Anyway … we learned quite a bit, honestly. We did.
MITTAL: We worked really hard, as well. Suraj is really awesome at running, so he used to always push me to get faster.
SHARMA: He used to push me to get bigger, and I used to push him to run harder.
MITTAL: We pushed each other.
SHARMA: And then, eventually, getting to meet Rinku. First, we'd talk to him on the phone and email and stuff like that, just to get an idea of how the journey was for him, what was going through his mind. You put all those pieces together. And, again, you use the internet to find out as much as you can. When you're in America for a few days and you don't really have anything to do, you don't really know if you're going to go out or what to do, so you end up watching TV and you watch baseball.
MITTAL: Or, in Suraj's case, you cannot go out because you're 20.
SHARMA: Yeah, you're 20 and you can't enter the bars. So, you just kind of use all of that and it all kind of came together.
MITTAL: I'm not as modest as Suraj. I think we worked really hard at it.
SHARMA: I mean, we worked pretty hard. I mean, we had to.
MITTAL: We put in the hours, we've gone through the injuries and we've taken everything chin up. What we'll do is, in the morning, we'll get up and practice baseball, then go and shoot the whole day and come back and work out for a couple of hours to get bigger, then go back to work the next day. We've been working really hard.
SHARMA: The trainers and coaches didn't really treat us so much as actors, at all. They treated us like athletes.
MITTAL: Absolutely.
SHARMA: And that helps. You get an understanding of what it was like to be in their place, when they were getting their asses kicked like this. Trying to deal with that, it puts you in a great place.
MITTAL: The best thing was, it was very relative for Dinesh when he was teaching us because they had to learn baseball in a very quick time, just like we did.
SN: And you guys had to learn it even quicker, right? Seven weeks?
MITTAL: Yeah, even quicker, but he knew what we were going through, so he could relate to us much easier and thus guide us accordingly, like what he did in those situations.
SHARMA: Luckily, we got enough time with Dinesh, because Rinku, he's obviously working (NOTE: By the time the movie production got rolling, Dinesh's career was finished. Rinku is still a baseball player). But we got Dinesh back home in India. Two weeks this year, he was with us, and it wasn't just the coaching, or it wasn't just watching him and how he does things. It's good research on him, for character and stuff. But also, the stories he tells you are strange, because you wouldn't expect people to be in that mindset when they're going through this. You'd think Dinesh and Rinku were really confused with this whole situation and it was probably pretty bad. And it was, but at the same time, you hear from these guys that they were just all the time trying to make the best of it. Firstly, there was pressure but they didn't take that into consideration. They would just keep on making fun of things, just trying to keep a jovial, good mood so they don't get down.
SN: What scenes were you shooting today?
SHARMA: We had the big pitching day today. I got a couple of strikes, thank God. I was really nervous I would throw it over the catcher or stuff. But last minute, I thought of something Rinku had said to me: 'When I was standing on the mound, all the world's pressure was on me, and I knew it. And I knew that this time I'm not just doing it to get into a team, I'm not just doing it for Million Dollar Arm and all that competition jazz, I'm doing this for my family. I'm doing this for all the people who put in all the effort to get me to where I am, and I'm just going to throw the s--- out of the ball and do my best because this is the moment. This is the pivotal, strong point and moment.' And when you start thinking of that, you just get into a zone.
SN: You go from a movie like "Life of Pi" where you're really skinny, to this where you're playing a pretty big guy in Rinku. What's that like?
SHARMA: It's strange, it's strange. I've realized that I have a metabolism, a super metabolism now because of losing all that weight, so I can't gain much. So I've tried. Again, that was weird because I don't really do the gym.
MITTAL: His is easier because he just had to put on weight. For me, it was weird because when I went in for the audition for this character, these guys were like, 'You're too buff for this," because I was basically double this size. So they were like, 'You're too buff for this character. Why don't you lose about half of what you are?' So I went and surfed for like three weeks and lost everything I had. I come back, get the role and Craig (Gillespie, the director) is like, 'Why don't you put on 20 pounds?' So it was a bit of a seesaw for me, but hey, that's the business. You've got to put your body on the line to look like athletes. It's even good for us because our performances look better when we are actually fitter.
SN: Having Dinesh there, your character, did you learn more from watching him or talking to him?
MITTAL: Both, and also working with him. As an actor, it's observation and imagination and a mix of everything. So I tried to take some of the qualities that are trademark Dinesh: he's very shy, he's very pure, very soft-spoken and he doesn't make a lot of eye contact.
SHARMA: He's a sweetheart, is what he is.
MITTAL: Yeah, that's true. He's an awesome person. He's the sweetest guy ever. So I've taken stuff from his real character, and I've tried to also put in some of my own interpretation, what I think. Because at the end of the day, it is a movie, it's not a documentary. It's important to bring your own thing.
SN: And what did you get from Rinku?
SHARMA: Well, I didn't get to meet Rinku until yesterday. But I'd talked to him on the phone, exchanged a bunch of conversations through email and tried to get an understanding of what was going through his mind. Sometimes, what happens when you don't meet someone is the responses you get are very generic, and you've got to break that. So I tried breaking that, tried talking to him, needling him and joking with him. And then you kind of realize Rinku is a no-pressure-gets-to-him kind of a guy. He's always calm.
MITTAL: He's a star.
SHARMA: He's always like, 'This is what's got to happen, so I'm going to do it. I have to throw that ball, I'm going to throw that ball. I have to do this in this situation, OK. I don't know English, I'll learn English.' So I tried capturing that, plus luckily I had Dinesh to tell me stories about Rinku. It kind of automatically happens in your head, you slowly become that guy in some respects. And when you're in front of the camera, you just bring that out. Rinku is an interesting character, but he's actually a lot like a friend of mine.
SN: How's that?
SHARMA: Well, he is like a real friend of mine. His demeanor is a lot like a person I know in real life, so I tried capturing that. (NOTE: At this point, a PA sticks her head around the corner of the tunnel we're sitting in and says, 'We're wrapped.' To which Sharma replies ...) Oh, hell yeah. Anyway, I tried copying his thing, and just basically mixed it up. As (Madhur) said, you use a little bit of what's real and you use a little bit of what's in your head, and obviously Craig's there to always help us through all of this. And it happens.
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