In the 80s and 90s Tom Alter (1950-2017) was the most famous ‘white man’ on TV. Easily recognisable after portraying his roles in popular TV serials such as Bharat Ek Khoj (1988), The Sword of Tipu Sultan (1990–1991), Zabaan Sambhalke (1993–1997), Junoon (1994-1998), Shaktiman (1998–2005) among others. In the movies, one of the roles he’s remembered the most for is from the blockbuster Aashiqui (1990).
Unknown to many, his son too has been part of several movies and series in the last few years. Jamie Alter is a sports journalist by profession, and has acted in web series such as Afsos (Amazon Prime, 2020), Undekhi (Sony Liv, 2022) and The Archies (Netflix, 2023) and was seen most recently in the film Maharaj (2024) on Netflix. An obvious question which we ask him is why the cricket writer, presenter and analyst, who started his career in 2005, never pursued acting as a career after his dad?
“Having seen at a very young age, the kind of struggle that my father had gone through from a financial level to a physical level to just the stories of rejection, I knew that this is not a line for the faint hearted. You have to be more than 100% fully invested here and ready to take hardships. Probably in my teenage years I would have realized there is one white skinned actor who’s made a name for himself in the film industry. And if that one man has had to do so much and it has taken him, the better part of 20 years to finally get recognition and good work, I just didn’t think there was any point in pursuing it. I didn’t have my father’s looks or his skill. I’m not saying that I was not enamoured by the entertainment world, having been on film sets and in green rooms. But sports from a very young age was equally important and pivotal in my life because my father was a sportsman himself. As sports persons, we settle for the next best thing, and that is to get paid to watch sports. I was in the US post college, and was homesick. I wanted to come back to India. Being obsessed with cricket, I figured that with the passion and knowledge for the game coupled with my grasp of writing and of speaking, both these worlds can be combined. And I took a big leap of faith at the age of 25 to quit the American dream and come back to India. And I don’t regret it for a single day,” Jamie explained to us.
The dabbling in acting started just before the lockdown, when he was approached to do a role in Afsos, a black comedy starring Gulshan Devaiah.
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The makers wanted a character who, like he and father, was white but actually Indian. They just googled Tom Alter’s son, and saw a lot of Jamie’s YouTube videos, especially a satire news show he would do for a news publication. Afsos released just a month after the pandemic, and Jamie’s phone started buzzing with all sorts of projects. It was quite an overwhelming experience for him, as he never thought that just doing a few scenes in the web series as a non trained actor would open up these doors, which is how the casting people got in touch with him for his role in Zoya Akhtar’s The Archies, where he played Mike Gomes, a City Council member of Riverdale.
Jamie with his father Tom Alter |
For Maharaj, they needed someone for the role of Arnsty, a young British lawyer who defends Karsandas Mulji (Junaid Khan) in court, and had spent a considerable amount of time in India. “Unlike the other Brits around him, he didn’t necessarily have to sound like the Teen Guna Lagaan type. They wanted someone who had a grasp of Hindi. The director of Maharaj, Siddharth P. Malhotra’s father and my father have a long association because they were the founders of Cinevistaas, which had produced the TV series Junoon (1994-1998). They also realised if there’s a white guy in India who speaks Hindi, it’s got to be Tom Alter’s son,” Jamie said.
However, Jamie’s foray into the cinema world would have taken place much earlier, in the form of an unreleased film called Alex Hindustani. The movie would have released in 2012, but apparently there was some problem between the producers and the distributors, as it was a tough film to sell, being an offbeat subject. He was the hero, unknown at the time, while the big names in it were the late Om Puri, his father Tom and Kulbhushan Kharbanda.
Either ways, one thing’s for sure, going forward a lot of us would be watching out for the kind of projects Jamie would be opting for, apart from his cricket analogies of course.
