Of navigating adulthood and romance: Eternally Confused and Eager for Love team decode coming-of-age series

When Zoya Akhtar came across a script penned by Rahul Nair, director assistant on Amazon Prime Video series Made In Heaven, which he had written a while ago, she says she found it so heartfelt, honest and funny that it engaged her completely. “It is not easy to read eight to 10 episodes normally but it was so breezy that I read it in one shot. We knew we wanted to make it,” says Zoya. The script was eventually adapted into an eight-part comedy series –Eternally Confused and Eager for Love which is produced by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s Tiger Baby Films, and Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani’s Excel Entertainment, for Netflix.

The series is a fresh take on the daily struggles of Ray, a 20-something-year-old who is trying to, against all odds, find love. In a quest to understand if he wants sex, love or a relationship, an overthinking introverted Ray goes through a series of work-life misadventures and indecisions, continually finding him. His life takes a hilarious turn as he heeds the advice of his imaginary friend Wiz (voiced by Jim Sarbh). Set to start streaming on Netflix from 18 March, the series has Vihaan Samat in the lead co-starring Rahul Bose, Suchitra Pillai, Jim Sarbh, Ankur Rathee, Dalai Mulchandnani among others. “You meet some people who work with you and you know that they have a very unique brain and unique take on life. Rahul is funny as hell. He is a writer, he writes like a beast and I was always curious about what he is going to do next,” says Zoya about the young debutant director.

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Interestingly, Eternally Confused is said to be Nair’s personal story; he returned from college in America to Mumbai in 2015. “I was studying in New York, I came back and I realised that life in Mumbai is very similar to the lifestyle that I was living in New York because you are struggling for romance and so many things are going on alongside. But Mumbai is also kind of uniquely different and it is never really explored in terms of content that we see…Mumbai was quite often portrayed as a crime-riddled city but there are many different aspects to the city and this version I felt was not seen. I also wanted to explore how an awkward person would think and that is where the voice came from. I wrote this in my free time while working on Excel and Tiger Baby projects whenever I went home,” says Nair.

Vihaan Samat, the show’s protagonist, has no qualms about revealing that he could relate to the character completely. “You will be surprised…honestly, a huge part of me was a lot like Ray a couple of years ago. But it changed because I learnt you can’t go through life that way (laughs). Not the best choice and I tried to mature up and be a little more straight forward. I remember reading the script and laughing a lot. The main challenge playing the part was I had to understand, ‘Who is Ray and why is he so anxious and where does his anxiety come from?’ Rahul and I had a lot of discussions about it and we did a lot of workshops and I also tried to figure out why he talked to an animated object. Then I tried to figure out both sides of the argument – Wiz’s and Ray’s that is essentially Ray so understanding all that from all perspectives and understanding it is just you. Thirdly, working on this sense of anxiety, how he behaves, putting him in different situations with different people who have different things at stake, and we tried a lot of improvisations which helped me understand who Ray was,” says Samat.

“Also,” he continues, “On set and even outside I was very anxious, I was doing and saying things outside of set and sometimes my friends would be like you are being a bit like Ray and I would say, ‘Sorry, I am in that space 12 hours a day’. It was actually quite exciting because when you find certain behaviour and when you start improvising and doing certain things that you usually don’t do that is all the fun of it. The takeaway from playing Ray and perhaps the youngsters can also learn is whoever you are is okay, growth is a constant process. Don’t beat yourself too much, be your own diaper (dialogue from the series) and don’t let those negative feelings down you too much because there are good times ahead.”

Recalling the first day of the shoot, Nair says, “I remember the first day Zoya was on set with us, we did the first take and I said ‘Cut’ and she said ‘How do you feel?’. I thought so many things in my head and the first thing I said was ‘I think we need to do another take’, and she said, ‘Exactly’. I was like, ‘Oh my god, so there is no profound moment here, it is just getting it right’, and I took that forward. Every day was a new day and it was a great experience.”

For Farhan Akhtar and Excel Entertainment, backing the project was a no-brainer considering that he found the writing very exciting. “Rahul has a unique voice that can be recognised very vividly in his writing and then of course the belief that Reema and Zoya had in him, mentored him to a certain extent and developed the project along with him. At times like these the best thing you can do is get out of the way (laughs) and let it do its own thing. I got out of the way and that is my only contribution,” laughs Farhan. Adds Reema Kagti, the founder of Tiger Films along with Zoya, “When I read the script I felt this was so real and relevant to young people and at the same time there is really nothing in the space which made it really unique for me. Also, the way Rahul had written it there was absolutely no toxicity in it. I loved that. It is a nice, heartfelt, clean perspective which kind of falls on the right side of the fence for me.”

With the production and cinemas getting impacted the last two years due to the pandemic, Excel Entertainment, like most production houses, continued developing content, says Farhan. “Of course, there are many issues that the pandemic created in our lives. But we were pretty fortunate that if not hands-on production and if not hands on being on set you could at least take that time and keep on developing projects and bring to the forth as time permitted. We were focused on developing stories, working with writers, technology is a huge boon, so you could still have meetings virtually and get some work done. That’s all you really could do,” says Farhan, who would very soon start rolling his directorial Jee Le Zara, a road trip film with Priyanka Chopra, Alia Bhatt and Katrina Kaif that he announced last year. “We have absolutely all intentions of starting filming Jee Le Zara this year,” he says. And as far as The Archies, a musical based on Archie comics is concerned, Zoya says, “We are working very hard…for Netflix, prepping and we will start soon.”

Eternally Confused and Eager for Love will release on Netflix on 18 March

Seema Sinha is a Mumbai-based mainstream entertainment journalist who has been covering Bollywood and television industry for over two decades. Her forte is candid tell-all interviews, news reporting and newsbreaks, investigative journalism and more. She believes in dismissing what is gossipy, casual, frivolous and fluff.

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