I auditioned for Mission Raniganj in Hindi. By the time the part reached the screen, the production had placed me as a British engineer and the role was in English.

That is one of the useful ironies of working internationally. The language used to win the room is not always the language spoken in the finished scene. The Hindi audition still demonstrated the commitment, adaptability and cultural fluency the production needed.

I remember the casting coming through NM Bollywood Casting, a prolific company I had worked with before. Repeated casting is never an entitlement. It is a quiet sign that trust has begun to accumulate.

The Yorkshire location was transformed. The art department built a village, the colliery entrance, period offices, industrial machinery and the working visual language of an Indian mining community.

For one overnight sequence, more than 500 extras were assembled alongside an eclectic British and Indian cast. Floodlights, vehicles, cables, cranes, tents and crowds filled the site. This was not a suggestion of scale. It was scale.

Big Indian productions often ask an art department to build an entire social world, not merely a background. The remarkable thing is how quickly the scaffolding and timber disappear once the camera turns. Yorkshire becomes Raniganj. The illusion holds.

When Mission Raniganj reached cinemas, I was in Amritsar playing General Dyer for Ram Madhvani’s The Waking of a Nation. From my hotel room I could see the cinema building and the advertising for the film.

Amritsar is largely low-rise, so the cinema stood out. I went to watch the film two or three times—seeing myself on the big screen opposite Akshay Kumar while spending my days inside another demanding Indian historical production.

There are moments when a career briefly becomes visible to the person living it. That was one: an old project illuminated across the city while the next role was already under way.