Pankaj Tripathi is today a household name, but long before his memorable performances in web shows—Kaleen Bhaiyya in Mirzapur (2018—), Madhav Mishra in Criminal Justice (2019—)—and those beloved parts in films like Bareilly Ki Barfi! (2017) and Stree (2018), it was easy to overlook his talent. In earlier films like Gunday (2014), Singham Returns (2014) and Dilwale (2015), you would have missed him if you blinked. He says he did these movies out of need but also out of desire.
Well-etched roles, the National School of Drama graduate knew, would not come his way quickly. “I hadn’t come [to Mumbai] with a plan. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I wasn’t choosy,” says Tripathi. “If I was getting a role which allowed me to pay rent or if I got to go to another city and do some work, it was better than sitting at home.” Tripathi recalls the Gunday scene in which his character dies. “I was shot, so I fell quickly to the ground, like how one does in real life,” he says. “Ali [Abbas Zafar, director] told me to first drop to my knees. ‘Theatre chhod and realism mein mat ghus [forget theatre and realism].’” For Tripathi, this was an education. For instance, he first learned about high-speed shots during Gunday. “Dimaag ka antenna khula rakhoge, toh you’ll learn a lot.”
Tripathi is an observant actor. He watches life, though, not films. “I have seen and heard so many things that I forget what I have imagined and what I actually observed,” he says. This practice of being inspired by real, fascinating individuals and past encounters is a method he uses to give his characters a memorable touch. In Mimi, a surrogacy-based comedy drama, set to release on Netflix and JioCinema on July 30, his character often says the same line or word twice, offering different meanings each time. Tripathi says that this is his ode to a man he knew in Belsand, his ancestral village in Bihar.
Tripathi’s directors are only happy to indulge the actor’s impulses. They will let him pause in between lines or afterwards. “Chuppi ka mazaa kuchh aur hai [There is an altogether different joy in silence],” he says. “We all can follow text, but subtext can only be found through pauses.” In Mirzapur, Powder [a 2010 TV show, now on Netflix] and Gurgaon (2016), Tripathi uses the pause to make his characters more intriguing and foreboding, while in Bareilly… and Stree, pauses exaggerate his comic timing. “We should not lose rasa [emotion] in the quest for realistic abhinaya [performance].”
Tripathi’s career can be divided in two halves: pre- and post-2017. Though he had charmed audiences in Masaan (2015) and Nil Battey Sannata (2015), it was with Newton (2017) that Tripathi finally broke out. Given how long he had waited, Tripathi found it hard to say no when the offers began to pour in. “Bhookh dabke lagegi, toh overeating ho hi jaati hai [When you are very hungry, you do tend to overeat],” he says. Working at a breakneck speed, he shuttled from one project to another between 2018 and March 2020.
The hyper-productivity, though, took a toll on his health. “I may not have been creatively burnt out, but was on the verge of a mental burnout,” he says. The actor constantly felt tired, even ending up in the hospital once. His experience on stage, though, ensured that despite the surfeit of work, his limitations as an actor weren’t exposed. “You develop another level of focus,” he says. “To meditate, one doesn’t need to go to the Himalayas. The challenge is to do it in the middle of a busy chauraha [crossing].”
The Covid pandemic gave Tripathi the break he needed. In the past 16 months, he has seen a number of his web shows and films release: Mirzapur, Criminal Justice, Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, Ludo, Shakeela (2020) and Kaagaz (2021). After Mimi, there’s ’83 in which he plays the manager of the 1983 World Cup-winning cricket team. Tripathi, for his part, says he has been trying hard to lie low. He has watched just four films, spending his time, instead, reading Hindi literature and making the most of the sylvan surroundings of his Madh Island home in Mumbai.
The wisdom he has gained, says Tripathi, makes him sound like a spiritual speaker: “Life is very fragile. Don’t hold grudges. We should be able to forgive. We will all leave empty-handed.” With this awareness, the workaholic actor shot for just three weeks this year. “There’s no urgency,” he says. “There’s contentment.”
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