English Babu, Desi Bhesh: The 'Firangis' Of Bollywood

In the last decade or so, Bollywood has truly gone to town with the period piece and the spy film. In both genres, the emphasis is either on fuelling nostalgia for a ‘golden’ past, or mining nationalism. Such films need villains, who the ‘heroes’ can outwit or physically beat. Enter actors Edward Sonnenblick and Mark Bennington—two of the most recurring faces playing British colonial figures, CIA operatives, Russian diplomats and the foreigner son-in-law in Bollywood. A wide range of films and shows, including RRR (2022), Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015), Heeramandi (2024), Kesari: Chapter 2 (2025), and, Captain Miller (2024), L2: Empuraan (2025) feature them in roles of the antagonist or supporting characters. 

Landing in 2005, drunk on the Bollywood kool-aid, Sonnenblick was more proficient in Hindi than anyone might have initially given him credit for. “It was Lagaan (2001) that got me hooked on Bollywood movies. Its emotions and storytelling really spoke to me,” he recounts. Teaching himself to read and speak Hindi, Sonnenblick claims he was fascinated by the cuisine, the spirituality and the language even before he set foot in India. “You could say I went to the Manmohan Desai School of Indian language and culture—so I hit the ground running.” Having gone back to his home in Northern California for a couple of years, he couldn’t stop thinking about Bollywood and Mumbai, so he came back in 2008 for good. 

Bennington’s journey is quite the opposite to Sonnenblick’s. An actor-turned-photographer by the time he came to Mumbai for the first time in 2010, he had all but given up on his acting aspirations. “I came to do a coffee table book on the acting community. I guess I ended up meeting the right people, who had the keys to the city, so to speak,” tells Bennington. Not at all interested in acting, one of his casting director friends asked him to audition for an international film called The Letters (2014), which Bennington kept putting off at first. “I’d just about begun dating my now-wife, and I looked at it as a free trip back to India,” remembers Bennington. “I did it, and I got the part. It was a horrible experience, and I remember thinking I’ll never do it again. I couldn’t comprehend sitting in the trailer for 10 hours, and then working for 40 minutes.” Despite his initial misgivings, two films and four years later, Bennington moved to Mumbai for a Bollywood career in 2018.

Sonnenblick recalls that one of his earliest auditions in Mumbai was for a TV show called Jhansi Ki Rani. “I showed up, and they gave me a script written in Devangari and asked me if I could do the scene. Fortunately, I could read Devanagari. I think it helped me stand out in the beginning especially.” Something similar happened to Bennington during the shoot of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (2015), where they gave him a one–page scene on the morning of a scene. “They were supposed to give me the lines the night before. But they were still writing it and gave it to me at 6 am, when we were supposed to shoot at 8 am,” says Bennington. “Somehow, I was memorising sounds that came out of my mouth in a particular order and saying them aloud.” Sonnenblick concurred with the feeling, saying he’s felt like that in Chennai.

Work has been relatively steady, busy even, in the last decade, with a majority of the roles being that of colonial figures. Not just Bollywood, even in a Tamil film such as Captain Miller (2024) and Punjabi film Guru Nanak Jahaaz (2025), at least two of the three American actors get cast as British characters. Is it exasperating to be offered similar roles, which are short-changed during the making of the film? “I don’t feel so bad, I understand that it’s just the way it is. There are lots of period pieces and it automatically means the British Raj, and I guess that’s where we come in,” concedes Bennington, going on to add that once in a while an interesting character comes around like he had in Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo (2023). “But I won’t hold my breath for it—it’s a business at the end of the day, and we have to recognise that.”

Sonnenblick—who Bennington half-jokingly calls the 'senior' between them because he started in Hindi films a few years before—has found some range to play with. He was cast as a Russian character in Jubilee (2023), an English cricketer blackmailed by the fixing mafia in Inside Edge (2017), and recently as a journalist investigating a small-town murder near Nagpur in Black, White & Grey (2025). “That was a great opportunity, in my books,” reveals Sonnenblick, “The doggedness and sincerity is what I really liked about it. The exercise of conveying his curiosity & confusion using the voice-overs was a good challenge.”

Outside the creative pursuit, the actors are still trying to adjust to the culture of Bollywood and Mumbai. Sonnenblick admits he tried and failed to handle his own calls in the beginning. “For all my Hindi-speaking skills and my obsession with India, it will remain a huge challenge for me to do business in India in a smart way. I’m too bhola (innocent)—I find some comfort in the fact that my wife Sonal, who is from the industry, has been my manager. She handles the tough stuff like the calls and the business side of things.” Bennington recommends something similar about having a manager or a representative to talk numbers. He recounts a time when a mainstream production house approached him for the part of a British villain: “I asked about the money, and they said Rs 4,000 per day. I hung up. The next day, they called again and offered Rs 20,000 per day, and I told them to call me back when they were serious. It took five or six rounds of negotiations and we reached an agreeable number,” remembers Bennington, whose wife hails from Pune, and who he credits for teaching him that these negotiations in Bollywood are a bit like a game. “It’s almost like gambling in Vegas.”

Sonnenblick is still getting used to how the city of Mumbai keeps working all the time, which he finds to his advantage as an actor, because people answer work-related calls even at 10 in the night. “It helps matters, where you can move on stuff, make some last-minute calls and confirm your availability, etc. It wouldn’t be the case in Hollywood, where most people clock out at 5 pm.” Both actors have got a sense for the industry’s lack of emphasis on punctuality. “I had this meeting for the book, and I got caught up in some bad traffic, and I was an hour late to the meeting,” says Bennington. “Coming from the States, I was ashamed about being late and I was feeling guilty, but then I found out that the others got there only 10 minutes before I did. They didn’t even notice (my tardiness).” 

Working in a foreign country, where one could get typecast owing to a lack of imagination, the shooting experience can be especially isolating. Neither Sonnenblick nor Bennington say they’ve ever felt isolated on a Bollywood set—but both accept that the wait can get excruciating. “Maybe you have a big scene coming up, they tell you that you have half an hour to get ready, and five hours later, no one’s shown up yet. You’re trying really hard to keep your game face on, be ready, and your conscience starts gnawing at you,” says Sonnenblick, who has come to accept it as “a part of industry.”

Having worked as an actor in New York and Los Angeles, Bennington concedes that there is a ceiling for the variety of work or the remuneration for actors who look like him. “Edward (Sonnenblick) has played a few principal characters, but they’re so few and far between.” Sonnenblick, whose focus recently is primarily on principal characters, agrees. “Yes, I suppose that’s something we hope to see evolve—that there’s a more global perspective in Indian films, so anyone can be seen as a protagonist character.”