About Raja Sethi
Born in New Delhi and raised in Tuscany, my relationship with cinema began very early. Coming from India, where cinema is deeply woven into culture and everyday life, I grew up experiencing film first through emotion, scale, music, and storytelling. But it was in Italy, through years of rigorous training and the guidance of great teachers, that I began to understand the deeper craft behind truthful performance.
I first stepped on stage as a child and played my first leading role in school theatre at twelve, long before I understood that acting would eventually become a lifelong pursuit.
I began studying acting seriously at nineteen and never stopped. My training spans years of rigorous work across the Stanislavski tradition, the Strasberg method, the Meisner technique, and physical action-based approaches, deepened through intensive study with Adriano Davi, Joseph Ragno, Susan Batson, Carl Ford, and through years spent reading and studying teachers such as Stella Adler, Larry Moss, Uta Hagen, and David Mamet.
Alongside acting, I spent years studying storytelling and script development. As an actor, I already understood character behaviour, psychology, relationships, and emotional truth, but writing forced me to confront structure, narrative architecture, and the deeper mechanics of storytelling itself. Over time, that study evolved from consulting on scripts into writing my own original work.
At the same time, I became increasingly interested in understanding why certain artistic and acting processes liberate actors while others drain them. That search led me into years of studying psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, embodiment, attention, and emotional regulation. The result of that fifteen year investigation eventually became The Human Actor.
Before entering the professional industry, I spent years working deeply on the characters that shape an actor inside rehearsal rooms and acting classes: Tom in The Glass Menagerie, Black in The Sunset Limited, Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy, Jerry and Robert in Pinter's Betrayal, Roma and Aaronow in Glengarry Glen Ross, as well as the characters of Shakespeare.
On screen I have worked in Sandokan (Rai, Disney+, Netflix US), DOC: Nelle tue mani (Rai), The Resurrection of the Christ directed by Mel Gibson, Suburra: Blood on Rome (Netflix), Bangla, Looking for the Truth, and Naturae. I also gave voice in Italian to Prabhu in Shantaram (Apple TV+).
On stage I appeared in La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler and in Speed by Mohamed-Zain Dada, where I played Abz.
As an author, I published Moksha Dharma · Oltre il Ring with Edizioni Lavoro in January 2026, reaching #2 on Amazon Italy in Boxing. A feature film adaptation is currently in development. I am co-writer, lead actor and creative producer of the short film Gradi di Coscienza, selected for funding through Nuovo IMAIE’s “Bando Cortometraggi” · First Session 2026 and now in production. I am also developing an original detective thriller set in Tuscany, Il Segno della Croce.