The Actor's Actor

Pick the most acclaimed and talked about films of the last three years, and chances are that Pankaj Tripathi has been in them. He’s become every director’s go-to guy for natural and effortless performances – and the audience loves him too. BY

- Arnesh Ghose

It might sound a tad cruel, but for me, Newton was a Pankaj Tripathi film. Rajkummar Rao wowed us as usual, but Tripathi brought such a wide variety of shades to his character – vulnerable, helpless, egoistic, frustrated – that it made his character’s journey much more memorable. I sympathized with his condition.

I had read stories about how Tripathi decided to become a professional actor when he was spending a week in jail, during his college days. He is a soft-spoken and very polite man, quite in contrast to the hardened men he often tends to play on celluloid. I ask him why he wanted to become an actor. “When I used to act in various plays in my village, people used to really enjoy it. They would compliment me a lot. And that was very encouraging. Later, when I was in Patna, a friend took me to watch a play, and that really changed my life. As a member of the audience, I was blown away. For the next two years, I would regularly watch all kinds of performances, from theatre to classical music events and so on. So, maybe all those performances and experiences collected in my bank account and left an impression on me. So, I thought, maybe I should do it too. It’s a lot of fun.”

Tripathi has crafted a niche for himself in the new phenomenon that is “small” commercial cinema, spearheaded by leading men and women like Ayushmann Khurrana, Rajkummar Rao and Swara Bhasker. Like Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s middle-class offerings, this brand of small-town (primarily Hindi heartland) cinema is competing quite successfully with big-budget, star-led commercial potboilers, simply because of good stories, excellent writing, natural performances and talented ensemble casts. Again, like Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films, this genre is rooted in family and social issues, often tackling the tradition versus modernity battle with wit, humour and dialogue