With his turn as Chatur Ramalingam in Rajkumar Hirani’s 3 Idiots, Omi Vaidya joined a select group of actors in Hindi cinema – those who are better known by their characters’ names than their own. Does that bother him? “I can’t think about that!” he laughs, although all he’s heard since he’s flown in to Mumbai (he’s from California and will be shuttling between Los Angeles and India for the foreseeable future) are people on the street hailing him as ‘Chatur,’ or – something that will make sense to those who’ve seen the insta-classic scene in 3 Idiots – ‘Balatkar’. “I will now have to bring the same force of identity to my next role as I brought to Chatur. I’m going to be singular,” he says. With the sort of spontaneity that brought life and a tremendous sympathy to Omi’s nerdy, blinkered ‘fourth idiot’ character in the film, it’s not hard to imagine Omi achieving some kind of seat-of-the-pants acting triumph with every other character. “You have to work with what you get, as an Indian actor in the USA,” he says matter-of-factly. “You do a lot of IT guy roles, comic roles. I enjoy those because you are expected to improvise on the lines you’re given, though. I enjoy the sarcasm. You get good at being comedic.” It isn’t the focus of his ambitions, though. “I’ve done a lot of drama as well, and I love it,” he says. “You have to temper the sarcasm with sincerity.”

Some of those dramatic performances happened all the way back in school and college for the young actor-in-training. “There is no way I could ever have been a senior VP with a centrally-heated swimming pool,” he says. “Every time I’ve had an office job, my main concern has been to get out of the place. My interest is in people, in performance, in travel.”

Notwithstanding his burgeoning career in Los Angeles showbiz, with well-received appearances on some of American television’s most popular shows (Arrested Development, The Office), Omi’s phenomenal debut in Bollywood has changed a lot for him. “I always thought I’d come back to Mumbai to explore Bollywood as a film-maker or something,” he says. “I never thought of acting here. I honestly didn’t expect to get the role, and I didn’t know if I could do justice to it. I practised walking around with my chest and butt thrust out and added a little bit of masala to my American accent. I consciously tried to make it an irritating voice.” It worked, as Omi learned within minutes of the film’s premiere. “At the beginning of the show, I walked in and no one stopped me at all. It took me an hour and a half to get out of the theatre once the film was over.”

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