Waris Ahluwalia
Waris Ahluwalia is an actor, born 1974.
The jewellery came first. Waris Ahluwalia, born in Amritsar and based in New York, built House of Waris after the owners of Maxfield's in Los Angeles noticed the elaborate diamond rings he was wearing, ordered a batch and sold out of them. The acting arrived as a side effect of being a striking presence in rooms that happen to contain directors.
That is not a slight on the work. His screen career is small and specific: nine credits here, most of them a scene or two, and a remarkable number of them for Wes Anderson. He is Vikram Ray in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the chief steward in The Darjeeling Limited, briefly present in Hotel Chevalier, and M. Dino in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which means he has been quietly furnishing that particular universe for a decade. Outside it he is Vikram Walia in Spike Lee's Inside Man, in a sequence the film builds an entire argument around, and Shai Kubelkian in I Am Love. More recently he turns up as The Eye in Ballerina.
He is not a career actor and has never pretended to be one. What directors keep hiring is composure: he can hold a frame without doing anything to it.
Movies (8)
TV (1)
Where to start with Waris Ahluwalia
Inside Man is where to begin, and it is not a close call. Ahluwalia has one substantial scene in it, and Spike Lee stages the whole sequence so the audience has to sit with what has just been done to the man rather than move on. Nothing else on his list asks that much of him.
After that, the Wes Anderson thread, in descending order of size: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Darjeeling Limited, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, where he is part of the crew rather than the joke. Hotel Chevalier is a short film and worth the detour for other reasons entirely. I Am Love uses him the way Anderson does, as texture with excellent tailoring, and Ballerina is the odd late entry, a hired-gun thriller that wants his stillness for atmosphere.