The only real education, he says, happened at the National School of Drama, where he met contemporaries like Irrfan Khan, Kumud Mishra and Saurabh Shukla―all of whom have brought in their “distinct and indigenous nuance to acting”.Īlongside his own talent and luck, Mishra agrees that a lot of credit goes to the directors and storytellers who came to him with the roles. Mishra has lost count of the number of films he has done so far, just like he has lost count of the number of times he has failed a certain class. I know so many actors who came during the time of Amitabh Bachchan but couldn’t make much of themselves.” “Because it was also important to sustain myself financially here in Bombay. “I simply went on doing whatever I got, never chose,”he says. That does not mean that he was picky when it came to roles. Let people know you from the characters you essay, if that happens, then you have truly arrived.” And, that is what has worked for Mishra―characters that become etched in time and even turn into memes (‘Dhondu, just chill’ from Shetty’s All The Best). “I am here to play a character on whom the entire film is based. “Even today, I do not want to play a hero,” he says. There were times when his roommates who were actors were taller, fairer and better built than him, and he would feel out of place. He never really “fit into the typical definition of a Bollywood hero”. “It is the time of the method actor who quite literally is the character and knows how to bring a story alive on screen.”Īnd, playing a character is what has excited Mishra all along, be it during his village theatre days in Darbhanga, Bihar, or in plays at school or family gatherings or in drama school or cinema. “That is happening now,” says Ankur Garg, who produced Vadh. Producers are now willing to bet their money on films helmed by Mishra. Unlike the Khans, who are just two years younger to him, Mishra is only now tasting success. Mishra, 59, entered the industry in 1991 at a time when Shah Rukh Khan was doing Idiot, a television series, and Salman Khan was riding on the success of his evergreen film, Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989). It is here that I read scripts and kind of channelise my energy.” “I am very creative when it comes to cooking a meal and designing a space. “An artiste must stay at a place that boasts a high aesthetic sense,” he says. The space overlooks the calming and meditative swell of the Arabian Sea. We are seated on a mattress on the floor inside his minimalistic yet beautifully done studio space in Mumbai’s Versova. To immerse myself into the character to the extent that I am no longer me I am only the manifestation of the character.Īs the conversation chugs along, so do the puffs. The point is to never deliver a false moment. It can call out a fake even without you knowing it.” That genuineness comes out on screen because the camera is nobody’s friend. “To immerse myself into the character to the extent that I am no longer me I am only the manifestation of the character. “The point is to never deliver a false moment,” he says, pulling a cigarette out of an ornamental case. It is in this realm, this broad range of emotions from the eccentricity of a comic to the angst of an old father, that Mishra thrives as an actor. Using his casual, unassuming naturalness, Mishra takes the audience through the emotional upheavals that turn a soft-spoken teacher into a cold-blooded murderer. In stark contrast to Rai Bahadur is the retired schoolteacher Shambhunath Mishra from Vadh, a film that released barely two weeks before Cirkus and had Mishra playing the protagonist alongside Neena Gupta. Mishra’s character of Rai Bahadur―wealthy, flashy and motormouthed―stood out as the only promising comic act in Cirkus, a remake of Angoor (1982) that was based on William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. In the side-role of a maverick father to Jacqueline Fernandez’s Bindu, Mishra’s live wire energy outshone that of an effervescent Ranveer Singh’s, who failed to sizzle despite a double role. It is an article on a popular website that says, ‘Sanjay Mishra is the real hero in Cirkus, not Ranveer Singh’.įor someone who spent more than half of his nearly 30-year-long career graduating from bit parts to supporting roles, this is huge. His face lights up on reading it his eyes well up and he goes silent for a while. On a pleasant Friday afternoon, exactly a week after the release of Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus―the last big budget Bollywood film of 2022―actor Sanjay Mishra receives a notification on his phone.
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