Vijay Varma: My role in Kaalkoot is of a police officer in the first few months of the job

Actor Vijay Varma in 'Kaalkoot' (JioCinema)

How do you follow up playing a serial killer in Dahaad? Vijay Varma does so by playing a righteous newbie cop tasked with solving an acid attack crime in Kaalkoot (JioCinema).

Varma’s character Ravi Shankar Tripathi is a reluctant cop who is coming of age in more ways than one. He’s solving crimes and swatting off his mother’s constant volley of prospective wives. The Gully Boy (2019) and Darlings (2022) actor talks about his latest work and inhabiting a cop’s uniform after 10 years. Edited excerpts:

In your debut film Monsoon Shootout, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013, you played a rookie cop. In the recently released web-series Kaalkoot, you play a newbie officer. How different is Adi from Ravi?

That’s a very interesting parallel and in my head, there is a parallel. I started my career with Adi in Monsoon Shootout. And it's then I went down several streams and branches. I am here right now after a while playing a police officer again. The similarity between these two characters is that they're both fresh into the police system, very idealistic and wide-eyed, with a certain naivete. But in order to play Ravi, I had to unlearn a lot of things. In the ensuing 10 years I'd been several things. A certain kind of jadedness comes with experience, so I had to let go of a lot of stuff and I had to bring back a certain kind of innocence. The writing helped me a great deal because it's about a police officer in the first two to three months of the job. The show starts with a scene where he is writing a resignation letter because he doesn't see himself fit for the job. He's not enjoying it. It’s too tough or too inhumane, or whatever his reason would be. The show humanizes a person in a police uniform. From there is becomes about how one case of an acid attack can give him enough reason to fight, to find himself and do the right thing. Interestingly, it’s the coming of age of a police officer. Kaalkoot is another name for the poison that came out of the Samudra Manthan. It refers to the battle between good and evil and the battle that’s not just outside, but also inside each of us.

So, what attracted you to this part — the social message, the opportunity to play a good cop, or something else?

First, the writing. It’s a script that moves so quickly and briskly. I was drawn in by the idea of playing a good guy, for a change. That was refreshing. Also, I wanted to unlearn, to just let go of the experiences I have and everything that I know and I wanted to approach this with a clean slate. It’s not about a concern about typecasting. I have enough work to disprove that but I want to see if this experiment works. I've never done this before to see if it works.

How do you ‘unlearn’?

You unlearn by consciously deciding to not do something that you've done in the past. I remember when I got back from FTII (Film and Television Institute of India), I wanted to do things the right way. It’s that feeling when you revisit your college pictures and something about that person feels different from who you are now. So, I wanted to identify with that person from 10-15 years ago. I feel like the answer to this lies in what Javed Akhtar told me after watching Gully Boy (2019). He said: You have great passion in you and that passion is more important than skills and experience. If you start relying on skills and experience, you will do the same thing again. Passion will take you to places that no new skill can take you. And I just focused on the passion. I believe Kaalkoot is my passion project.

What are some of your tools for crafting these characters?

When you do diverse roles and when you experience life as an actor, or practice the craft of acting you pick up more and more of an understanding of life and people. When you have read enough (Anton) Chekhov, Manto and (Ismat) Chughtai, you understand the bleakness of life. When you read Premchand you understand the innocence of life. When you read Gulzar, you understand poetry and romance in life. So, you take from literature, from life experiences, and you maybe grow wiser and you become more accepting of several things. I feel like philosophical growth happens. This is an actor’s treasure chest.

Your Mirzapur co-star Shweta Tripathi too has tried something new in her role as the acid attack survivor Parul. What was it like working with her on Kaalkoot?

Shweta is a mad artist and she completely surrendered herself to a part which was very difficult. It’s a new take on an interesting character. I think she was also in the process of reinvention. It was also a deliberate attempt by the director to cast actors against the grain and to see what they can do with the material, whether it was Seema Biswas who is portraying my mother, who can cause havoc just by her cuteness, or Shweta or myself.

What’s next?

There are quite a few exciting things. There’s Mirzapur 3, which should be out soon. Then there is Sujoy Ghosh’s film which is an adaptation of The Devotion of Suspect X and Homi Adajania’s film Murder Mubarak.