New Delhi: Whether he’s a CIA official brokering secrets in The Family Man season 3 or a weathered football coach shaping a fledgling club in Real Kashmir Football Club, Mark Bennington has become one of Indian cinema’s most recognisable foreign faces.
With his clipped accents, restrained performances, and refusal to lean into caricature, the dapper American has spent over a decade dismantling the stock “bad white guy” roles that once defined foreign actors in Hindi films and TV series
From British officers and CIA agents to French fixers and American corporate bosses, the 49-year-old actor has built a career in India by turning stereotypical parts into layered characters.
Trained in theatre in New York and Los Angeles before moving to Mumbai in 2010, Bennington is a chameleon breaking the mould of the typical “white guy” on Indian screens.
“Anytime a white actor makes his presence here, the comparison is automatic. Tom Alter was born in India and he is fully Indian even though he is White and speaks fluent Hindi. But when it comes to me or Edward (Sonnenblick), we are foreign actors with accents, and we get mostly British roles,” said Bennington. Alter died in 2017.
Bennington met Alter in 2011 when he was interviewing celebrities from the Hindi entertainment industry for his coffee table book, Living the Dream: The Life of the Bollywood Actor. Before that, he had been acting for over a decade in New York and Los Angeles.
“I think that set me apart from my colleagues here because they did not have any background in acting,” said Bennington, who started out with a small role in the film Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (2015).
He started auditioning for roles with the international project The Letters (2014), whose casting director was Tess Joseph, known for films like Mira Nair’s Namesake (2006). The experience of working in the film, however, Bennington said was not particularly enjoyable so he decided not to try again.
But in 2015, when a friend reached out for a role in Dibakar Banerjee’s film, Bennington decided to try again, and recorded an audition tape and sent it. Banerjee liked the role, and he became Deputy Commissioner Wilkie in the film.
But like most white actors in India, he mostly played the ‘bad’ British guy, before transitioning to other significant roles.
The bad British
The 49-year-old actor recalls an incident from shooting for the film Devil: The British Secret Agent (2023), when he was asked to be ‘more British’.
“I remember getting a call about a role, and when I asked what it was, he replied, I was to play a British guy. When I asked for specifics, he simply said–you play a bad British guy. That was the only note for my character,” said Bennington.
The other challenge is not getting a script until the day of the shoot, prompting the actor to rely on impromptu performances.
For Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi (2024), where he plays a British officer Samuel Hemderson, Bennington researched Lahore in the 1940s and the actual location of Heeramandi. He would then show up in the morning, get the script on the spot. “Then, about two hours later, after memorising the lines, they would make some changes, requiring us to learn new lines quickly. It demanded agility, quick thinking, and being present in the moment,” he said.
In Bombay Begums (2021), Bennington plays Jeff, the CEO of a US Company, who has a fling with Fatima, played by actor Shahana Goswami. It is also the only role Bennington did not audition for.
Bennington and Goswami, who worked together for the first time, were able to create the moments in the show that showcase their characters’ loneliness and vulnerability.
“We all know people who have married a foreigner, or like Mark, choose to live here. But we still do not see those characters on screen. Our understanding of what it means to be a foreigner is also limited,” said Goswami.
Despite generic roles and limitations of the script, Bennington tries to bring his own flavour to the character he plays. His first big role on OTT came with the Sony Liv web series Rocket Boys (2022), in which he talked in a Chicago accent. He played CIA officer Robert Crowley in the show based on the lives of Homi J. Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai.
“People here might not be able to differentiate but the accent in Alabama is going to be different than that in New York. And I wanted to showcase that,” said Bennington.
Breaking the mould
In Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo (2023), Bennington plays Donze, who helps Savitri (Dimple Kapadia) run ‘Rani Co-operative’, that produces handicrafts by day, and smuggles cocaine and the drug flamingo by night. Donze encourages Savitri to establish her clandestine business, even helping her plant the first saplings of coca, and eventually returning to test out Flamingo.
What we get to see on screen is a relationship between two people in their sixties, holding onto a relationship despite time and distance.
It is Bennington, who brings out the nuances of Donze, that could have well been a stereotypical character of a French hippie.
Bennington and Kapadia share the most screen space in the web series, dreaming of a future where the two can stop scheming their way around the law and quietly enjoy the calm of a slow life. These moments also allow Savitri to live just for herself, instead of putting everything at stake for her children and the community of women she looks after.
“It was wonderful working with him for the first time. He always brought great energy to the set, and I was pleasantly surprised by the skill and technique he brought to his character,” said Dimple Kapadia.
The Homi Adajania directorial also landed him a part in his upcoming film, Cocktail 2. Adajania was impressed by Bennington’s role as an interrogating officer in the film Angrezi Medium (2020).
“ He asked me what accent I wanted, and he really played around with it, and we developed the looks and the persona–he fit the form of the wordy-wise con man easily. There is also another thing that Mark is an absolute joy to have on set, with his dark humour, stories. He is extremely professional but also really fun,” said Adajania.
Also read: Real Kashmir Football Club to Songs of Paradise—how OTT is revisiting Kashmir
That one trip to India
Bennington grew up in Northern California and attended Mike Nichols’ The New Actors Workshop (MFA acting program) in New York City. He went on to work in theater for 10 years, performing the classics as well as experimenting with the form.
He had little idea about Bollywood or India, barring Danny Boyle’s The Slumdog Millionaire (2008). But on his 40th birthday, when his yoga teacher in Los Angeles was leaving for an India tour, Bennington decided to accompany her. He landed in Delhi on 1 January 2010. After roaming around in the country as a tourist, from Mysore to Mumbai, he decided to reach out to a few contacts at Rolling Stone magazine. One of them introduced him to Bollywood lawyer Jamshed Mistry, who helped him meet producer Guneet Monga.
It was Monga who introduced him to actors, and Bennington decided to put together the coffee table book. The book, which took more than five years to complete, captures 112 Bollywood actors, from stars like Salman Khan, Ranveer Singh, Alia Bhatt, and Ranbir Kapoor to newcomers like Varun Thakur and Geetika Tyagi.
The foreword to the book has been written by filmmaker and producer Karan Johar. It was finally published in 2017, after he had made numerous visits to the actor’s homes, to have conversations and take their photos.
“The hardest person to get a hold of was Vijay Raaz. He was constantly travelling, all over the country. And I had to get him for my book, because I was completely bowled over by his performance in Monsoon Wedding,” said Bennington.
From reshooting a female actor who did not like the way she looked in Bennington’s photos to getting a star to be unguarded just enough for a photo, the project gave Bennington access to an industry that few get a chance to capture.
He was moving between LA and Mumbai, when he was working on the book. Eventually, it was his relationship with Taapsi Ramchandani, a cultural anthropologist and the co-founder and CEO of Poocho, that made Bennington take the leap of faith to stay on, and also start working in the entertainment industry. The two eventually got married in 2013.
In 2019, he returned to the theater after 16 years, directing Jeff Goldberg’s The Mumbai Terror Attacks at The Royal Opera House in Mumbai and acting in Devika Rani: Goddess of the Silver Screen, directed by Lillette Dubey.
The American, who had little idea about India a few years back, has now completed writing and directing his first film Dear Tillo, an ode to Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and the character of Alice, played by Tillotama Shome. The film, currently in post-production, will be sent to film festivals in the upcoming year.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)