It was Steven Spielberg's 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler's List that inspired John Abraham to pursue a career in cinema. After featuring in several music videos and many modelling assignments, he entered the industry in the early 2000s.
And when that happened, it was all about Jism, the Bollywood actor-producer said, tongue firmly in cheek as he referred to his 2003 debut film, an erotic thriller.
"It was all about the body (then). And I didn't shy away from it. There's a huge audience that appreciates that. And I love it. But it was also very important for me to make a point. So Kabul Express, New York, Madras Cafe and The Diplomat, these relevant films started coming in. But once I became a producer, I've gone full out," John Abraham told PTI in a recent interview.
But how did he manage to break out of his early eye-candy image?
"You can't break your image by doing 40 interviews and saying 'I want to break that image'. My work speaks for what I'm doing. When people talk to you, you understand what you're about from the way they speak with you," he added.
Barely nine years after he debuted with Jism, John Abraham kickstarted his journey as a producer with 2012's sleeper hit and National Award winning Vicky Donor, which also marked the first feature film of Ayushmann Khurrana and Yami Gautam.
Since then, he has backed films such as Madras Cafe, Batla House and Attack and several others, many of which he acted in too.
The actor, who is looking forward to the release of political action thriller Tehran, said he wants his audience to explore "how India's involved with the rest of the world". And that comes from his childhood where his father made him read editorials of newspapers every morning.
"Even today, I go to my office at 7 in the morning on a non-shooting day and for the first two hours, I only catch up with what's going on in the world. If you ask me about Tehran and you say, why did you do this film, I can speak to you about the Iran-Israel conflict. I can speak to you about everything under the sun, not because it's an exam for me but because I love this space."
John Abraham said it is important to keep abreast of geopolitics because everything is connected.
"People say, 'what do we have to do with it? We only have to do with Pakistan'. That's not true. You need to understand what is happening in the geopolitics of the world to understand what is happening with India."
But this doesn't mean he will stop doing the fun movies like Pathaan and Force 3.
"The day I announce Force 3, I know I'll have the Force body... I hope that my commercial cinema, the hardcore commercial cinema I do, also makes a lot of sense."
Tehran, a Maddock Films production that will start streaming on ZEE5 from August 14, is a fictionalised account of a true event that unfolds against the simmering global tension between Israel and Iran. It draws inspiration from the 2012 bomb explosion near the Israeli Embassy in New Delhi.
