Actor Prashantt Guptha bagged the 10th National Excellence Award for Best Villain with his debut film, Issaq (2013). He will now be seen in Rahat Kazmi's Identity Card that releases on August 29. Prashantt plays a Kashmiri cop in the film that has Saurabh Shukla, Vipin Sharma, Raghubir Yadav, Brijendra Kala and Tia Bajpai in the cast. The film highlights the importance of an identity card in Kashmir, as without it, a person can be interrogated, arrested and labelled a terrorist. This will be his second film as a cop after Issaq.
Incidentally, Prashantt has just returned from the US after bagging the Best Supporting Actor award for Identity Card, which also won Best Film and Best Director awards at the San Francisco Global Movie Festival. Prashantt was the only actor from Issaq and Identity Card to get two awards in two months.
Other than films, Prashantt has done several ads and has also signed a year-long contract with a US based watch company, Marcel Drucker. Recently, he also took it upon himself to promote the natural breathing fabric, cotton, by shooting a pro-cotton campaign for Cottonwala that was well-received.
Born and brought up in Queens, Prashantt went to high school in Brooklyn Tech and college at Baruch - The City University of New York. He landed in Mumbai in 2007 with a return ticket to New York, since he planned to fly back in two months' time. But he cancelled the ticket upon landing and decided that there was no turning back.
