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Actor Rajiv Surendra, best known as rapper and Mathlete Kevin G of Lindsay Lohan’s “Mean Girls”, revealed the heartbreaking reason he quit films.
Surendra told GQ that he desperately wanted the lead role in “Life of Pi” – for which he dropped out of college and prepared rigorously six years. The role eventually went to the newcomer Suraj Sharma, who became an overnight sensation following the film’s release in 2012. The film got 11 Oscar nominations and Ang Lee won the Best Director Award.
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“While we were shooting ‘Mean Girls’ during my first year of college, I found out they were turning ‘The Life of Pi’ into a film. I was determined to get that part. So, I dropped out of college to go to the little town in India where the book takes place so that I could do some in-depth research. I did that for a few months and came back and was just waiting for them to start production. I assumed that it was going to happen any day now and it didn’t. They lost their director and the project ended up getting put on hold so I went back to college,” he told GQ.
“The project kept getting delayed. Three months turned into a year turned into four years. It was actually six years because of that year off,” he added.
Surendra shared details of the preparation he put in for the part, including research he did on each director attached to the project. “‘Life of Pi’ was attached to four different directors over the years so every time a new director (came aboard), I’d go to the library and get out all the movies they had made and research that director. I worked really, really hard to try to get this part. In the end, they gave it to somebody else.”
Surendra said about the day he received the rejection e-mail: “I felt like someone had died. Very slowly over the course of six years, I was building this boy that was a character in a book. By the end of those years, that was a real person inside of me. Those old Tamil songs I listened to as a kid, Pi would’ve listened to those songs. When I got the email saying I didn’t get the part, I felt like that person just died instantly. It was traumatic. I think I was in shock for a couple weeks. I felt dead inside for a long time.”
Apart from “Mean Girls”, Surendra has featured in a short, titled “6 ft. in 7 min”. He now has 56.1K subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he shares DIY crafts videos.