A curious case

Bollywood buzz

He never aspired to be in films. This successful television actor was, however, tempted by the package of UTV, Abhishek Kapoor and the script that made him take up Kai Po Che!. Sushant Singh Rajput was only auditioned for the role he played among the three male protagonists. “But, if given a choice from the three roles, I would do the same role again,” he admits.

While actors are actors, he thinks, Sushant does feel that film actors are bigger than their small-screen counterparts. “There are minor technical differences — on television, there are extreme close-ups, work is fast and when you are on a reality show, everything is live and you are playing yourself,” he notes. “You have to convince yourself to prepare and research, and everything works when the script and co-star are right.”

Dreaming big

Noting that the problem with television today was (lack of good) content, which is not only illogical but stretched and repetitious, he adds, “For an actor, though, it is easy and great money and you can get famous quickly. I quit Pavitra Rishta because things were getting too monotonous.”

On the other hand, he would prefer even his film career to be more about substance than just success. “My film Shuddh Desi Romance was real, as is Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! (DBB!). These are my kind of films. But I concede that larger-than-life films are liked. Even with songs, I have now become comfortable.”

Coming up after this is M S Dhoni: The Untold Story, which is a biopic, for which Sushant is shooting. But this is that first time that Sushant is promoting one film while working on another. “I am getting the hang of this now,” he smiles when we meet at Yash Raj Films Studio. “All my earlier films were shot and promoted before I began work on my next. This does become a bit disorienting, though.”

Sushant was last seen in PK, in which he had a small role. “But the hard work is the same,” he points out. “Whether it is as Sarfaraz in that film, or in the title-role in DBB!, I put in the same mehnat.”

Is he nervous now that DBB! is on release, completely riding on his shoulders, as there is not even a regular, known heroine? “I never thought of that angle. Yes, I am a bit nervous, because the audience should accept what we have made, after all the efforts we have put in,” he smilingly admits. “But I am confident, and more excited than nervous. I have been asked if the characters and films I accept are not professional risks, but I think that they are challenges.”

He explains, “A genre alone does not decide if a film is good or bad, or will do well or not. Dibakar came to me two-and-a-half years after conceiving the film and had already put in that much homework. The whole team has put in its best, wanting to translate a good script completely on to camera. And this kind of maximisation happens only when the filmmaker and the actors are all looking for the same thing.”

Dismissing the intimate sequences he has done in the film as “unexpected for Byomkesh, the character, but not for me as an actor”, Sushant insists that actors must be ready for anything as part of their work. “But Byomkesh, just out of college, was not prepared for the seduction, and I had to show his discomfort.”

In character

Was he able to contribute something specific to his character after all the research and work done by his director? “As actor and technician, you always bring in something with you, but I cannot pinpoint anything and say that I did that. I kept having long conversations about the film and about Byomkesh with Dibakar, and he would keep telling me to change or maintain what I offered while shooting.”

Sushant adds, “Dibakar instructed me not to watch the original Byomkesh videos, because we wanted to come up with our own take on the character of this detective. So I read the script, then read all his 31 or 32 stories, and then went back to the script. Dibakar has mixed two or three stories, shown how a man fresh out of college turns into a detective in 1943’s Calcutta, with World War II and our freedom struggle in full fettle, and what was happening in the port city then, with the Japanese invasion, crime syndicates and so on.”

Period films recreate the ambience with a mix of sets and visual effects that are added later. How much did all that help Sushant to move into his character? “Let me first say, ‘Hats off to all our technicians,’ because it is their work that made me so confident,” replies the actor with a smile. “Our production designer was so good that I never felt I was on a set, because normally, sets look like sets and this looked like a real city. Even the chroma screens for the visual effects were expertly done, so the results were fantastic and a complete source of validation.”

He is happy when we tell him that his director has been raving about him as the choice for Byomkesh, stating that Sushant is hugely popular, good looking, is everything that makes for a typical Hindi film star, but also inward-looking and fierce, eccentric but not flamboyant. He says that Sushant refuses to act until he has worked three or four days on a scene, discussed it and rehearsed it four or five times and that he is a nice, well-mannered man who can shockingly be rude too.

Sushant laughs and keeps smiling as we add that Dibakar feels that he is a great, understated actor, who is an enigma and has unknown depths. All these characteristics are what make him perfect as Byomkesh. Sushant merely replies, “I am truly intrigued by Bengal’s most famous fictional detective. Here is a man who has no secure job. He has a different wiring from all of us. I am thrilled that Dibakar chose me.”

Alright, one query we always wanted to ask: Is he using the name Sushant Singh Rajput to differentiate his identity from the other Sushant Singh around? “Not at all,” he states. “This has been my name from the school records.”
And how much has playing the detective rubbed off in real life? “Not now, but I would always investigate the details of pretty girls in my college,” he laughs.