By: Entertainment DeskNew Delhi | October 2, 2025 03:20 PM IST 3 min readDenzil Smith played a supporting role in Christopher Nolan's Tenet. (Express Archive)There aren’t a lot of people in the world who can claim to have worked with Christopher Nolan and Abbas-Mustan, and that, too, back-to-back. In fact, there might just be one: Denzil Smith. He played a supporting role in Nolan’s 2020 film Tenet, and then jumped into a project directed by Abbas-Mustan. More interestingly, Smith is also perhaps the only actor to have played by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.In a chat with Pooja Bhatt on her new podcast, he spoke about both experiences, and revealed who was the more interesting character to play between Jinnah and Nehru. He said, “Nolan is an intense guy, and highly secretive. They don’t reveal anything of the script to you. In fact, when you get your sides, you are sitting with two executives and one AD in a closed room, and they make you sign three or four NDAs. You are briefed, and you are given just your scenes. He’s a very precise director; in fact, he knows exactly what he wants, and shoots exactly that. The scale of that production was something else. The professionals involved were all top-notch. At that time, it was the most expensive Hollywood film of that year. It was $450 million (nearly Rs 4,000 crore).”Also read – Paul McCartney was enthralled by Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz, phoned Bipasha Basu to praise her: ‘India’s Sophia Loren’Tenet also featured Dimple Kapadia in a prominent role, and was led by John David Washington and Robert Pattinson. Tenet cost $200 million, according to Forbes, and grossed around $360 million globally. The reason behind its low box office performance was that it was the first major studio film to be released theatrically after the pandemic. It debuted in 2020 itself, mere months after the virus broke out, and before a vaccination had been rolled out. The movie received a theatrical release in India, where a major portion of it was shot, only months later.Smith was perhaps working on his Abbas-Mustan project by then. He said, “It was scary. When they said the magic words, ‘pack up’, everybody ran like dogs left from a leash towards one small exit to get out of there. It was scary indeed. This was during COVID.” The project in question is probably 3 Monkeys, which remains unreleased. Abbas-Mustan also directed the Netflix project Penthouse, featuring Arjun Rampal and Bobby Deol. But it remains unreleased as well.In the same interview, Smith also spoke about playing both Jinnah and Nehru, and said that while he had access to hours upon hours of footage of Nehru, very little of Jinnah is available. He said that Jinnah has been broadly demonised in India as the man responsible for the Partition, which made him a more interesting person to play.Click here to follow Screen Digital on YouTube and stay updated with the latest from the world of cinema.© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd