A few weeks after the first season of The Family Man started streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Manoj Bajpayee’s fan base expanded beyond his wildest dreams. The 52-year-old actor suddenly found himself besieged for by children autographs—from his nine-year-old daughter Ava Nyla’s playgroup. Bajpayee was no stranger to adulation from fans, but he was certainly not expecting to be a hero for kids born around the time Gangs of Wasseypur was released in 2012.
That’s what makes Bajpayee the ultimate family man, loved and adored by children as much as he is by their parents. The over-the-top (OTT) universe—the brave new world of entertainment—has found a new superstar. An actor from a nondescript village in Bihar without the trappings of a typical Bollywood star, a man who could be your next-door-neighbour, an actor who lives the characters he plays.
But there has been never any doubt about Bajpayee’s range and calibre as an actor ever since he began his journey in Mumbai 27 years ago. And his sensitive portrayal of Srikant Tiwari in the hit web series The Family Man is just what he has always been doing since arriving in Mumbai—from playing the iconic Bhiku Mhatre in Satya (1998), or Sardar Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), or Ram Chandra Siras in Aligarh (2016). By the time TFM Season 2 came along this year and quickly reached the top four on the list of most-watched shows in the world, Bajpayee emerged as the face of the Indian entertainment industry, especially in the digital arena. From movies to series, short films, historical shows and even a Bhojpuri rap song, he is doing it all.
In just about a year when most of his contemporaries were waiting for the Covid pandemic to be over, Bajpayee was seen in as many as four feature films (Mrs. Serial Killer, Suraj Pe Mangal Bhari, Silence ...Can You Hear It? and Dial 100), two web series (The Family Man and Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa of the Ray anthology). He also did a Bhojpuri rap video, Bambai mein ka ba?, on the migrant issue, apart from being the narrator in Secrets of Sinauli, a history show on the Discovery Plus channel.
That he won the National Award for Best Actor for his performance in Bhonsle (2018) and also several other prestigious awards, both in and outside the country for TFM, in the same period, has proved to be the proverbial icing on the cake for him. Bajpayee has been on a roll as an actor on all mediums lately with his insatiable hunger to perform better than his last role. But it is primarily his tryst with OTT in the character of Srikant Tiwari, a middle-class man torn between his duties towards his family and the nation, in TFM that has made him the phenomenon, so much so that he is now being hailed as the Superstar of OTT, the King of the Digital Era and what not. But he remains as humble as the first day in tinsel town. “I feel happy to know that people like my work, but these titles are not for me,” he tells Outlook. “I am simply an actor and I would like to be remembered as one. Nothing more, nothing less!” (See interview)
On the face of it, it’s ironic for someone who always took pride in being nothing but an actor, and fought relentlessly against the deeply entrenched star system to carve out a niche for himself, to be conferred such monikers, but he cannot help. The distinction between a star and an actor has blurred in the OTT space, where only the craft of the performer matters. And Bajpayee, with all the experience and expertise of a passionately trained actor, fits like a pair of gloves in the brave new world.
Bajpayee, on his part, makes light of the sobriquets, saying actors such as Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Jaideep Ahlawat, Pankaj Tripathi and others deserve the honour more than him. But those who have worked with Bajpayee insist that he deserves all the accolades. “As an artiste, you want the world to recognise your worth and you feel vindicated when your craft finally reaches out to a larger audience. I think Manoj deserves every bit of what he is getting and much more,” says Hansal Mehta, who directed Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar! (2000) and Aligarh. “Actors are becoming stars and getting their due across the world due to the advent of OTT.”
But OTT is just another medium for Bajpayee. Even before he made his debut on the digital platform with TFM, he never fought shy of trying out new mediums and genres. As a performer, he has been equally at ease doing an Aligarh or Bhonsle, on one hand, and Baaghi 2 (2018) and Satyamev Jayate (2018), on the other, straddling the diametrically opposite worlds of serious, meaningful cinema and high-octane commercial flicks with the consummate ease of a seasoned trapeze artiste. In fact, it has been the most discernible pattern all through his career.
After the mega success of Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya (1998) where he played Bhiku Mhatre of ‘Mumbai ka king kaun?’ fame, he found movie moguls queuing up with lucrative offers to play similar characters in their upcoming films. After years of struggle, he finally had the chance to go on a signing spree and mint money like many of his predecessors, but he chose not to get typecast by playing stereotypical villains mouthing inanities like ‘yahan ka patta bhi meri ijazat ke bagair nahin khadakta (even the leaves here do not flutter without my permission)’.
Instead, he picked small-budget movies such as Shool (1999), Kaun? (1999), Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (2000) and Ghaath (2000). None of these films set the cash boxes ringing the way Satya did, but he had the satisfaction of having done what he always wanted to do. His perseverance paid off when filmmakers of repute such as Shyam Benegal (Zubeidaa/2001), Rakesh Omprakash Mehra (Aks/2001), J.P. Dutta (LoC Kargil /2003) and Yash Chopra (Veer Zaara/2004) signed him for their big-ticket projects. Most of these movies also did not click, but it did not harm Bajpayee’s impeccable credentials either. Far from it, he won the Special Jury Award at the National Awards for the Chandra Prakash Dwivedi-directed Pinjar (2003) to reaffirm that Satya was no flash in the pan.
ALSO READ: Manoj Bajpayee Is A 360-Degree Character
The making of Bhonsle
But the second half of the noughties proved to be both personally and professionally tough for him, which was in a way strange because it was the time when Bollywood was turning over a new leaf with the ascendancy of new-age filmmakers such as Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Hansal Mehta and others, who were all old associates. But it turned out to be a period when nothing seemed to work in his favour. Even a war movie like 1971, which went on to become a cult hit with more than 32 million views on YouTube alone, ran to empty theatres in 2007. Beset with injuries, he had no work for many years.
But Bajpayee did not let frustration creep in, as he immersed himself in yoga, meditation and workshops, apart from keeping tabs on the work of new directors. “I would call each director whose film I liked, be it Neeraj Pandey (A Wednesday/2007) or Dibakar Banerjee (Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!/2008) and ask for work,” he recalls. “I did not consider that as a lean period, but a time for preparation. I was just waiting for the right opportunity to come.” That opportunity finally came when filmmaker Prakash Jha called him for Raajneeti (2010), a multi-starrer with actors such as Ajay Devgn and Ranbir Kapoor, on one hand, and stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah and Nana Patekar, on the other. With a power-packed performance in the role of a wily politician, he stole the thunder and gave a karara jawab (befitting reply) to his detractors who had written him off by that time. He followed it up with Anurag Kashyap’s epoch-making Gangs of Wasseypur and repositioned himself as someone who could deliver irrespective of whether he worked for Hansal Mehta’s Aligarh or Boney Kapoor’s Tevar (2015).
Patna-based academician Gyandeo Mani Tripathi, Bajpayee’s childhood friend, says that one of the reasons behind Bajpayee’s success is that he never deviated from his goal. “While all his friends were aspiring to become IAS officers, doctors or engineers, he went to Delhi to do theatre and make it to NSD,” he says. “He did graduation only to be eligible for admission to NSD. He could not make it, but he joined Barry John’s acting classes and also formed a theatre group, Act 1, with his friends in which his stunning performance in a play, titled Netua, became a talking point in theatre circles. He has not looked back since.”
Interestingly, Bajpayee is being called the superstar at a time when the reigning superstars, from the Khan triptych of Aamir, Salman and Shah Rukh to Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn, appear to be struggling to retain their status as undisputed box-office kings. With the audience giving thumbs-up to good content and the emergence of a platform like OTT, movies of many big stars have bombed lately. From Salman’s Radhe (2021) and Akshay’s Lakshmi (2020), Bell Bottom (2021) to Devgn’s Bhuj: The Pride of India and Varun Dhawan’s Coolie No. 1, their extravaganzas failed to pass muster with the audiences. On the contrary, actors like Bajpayee, Pankaj Tripathi, Pratik Gandhi and Jaideep Ahlawat got their due, thanks to the excellent story-telling and performances in series like TFM, Mirzapur, Scam 1992 and Paatal Lok.
But how did Bajpayee manage to survive and reinvent himself over and over again to stay afloat against all odds in the years when he had fewer choices? With small roles in films like Drohkaal and Bandit Queen in 1994, he had made his debut in an era when Bollywood seemed obsessed with romantic musicals shot on pretty as a peach Swiss meadows and the tulip gardens of Keukenhof. He just hung in there waiting for his time until Satya happened.
Underlining the key factors behind Bajpayee’s success, director Abhishek Chaubey, who has worked with him in Sonchiriya (2018) and in Hungama Hai Kyon Barpa (2021), says what he brings to the table with his talent, training and experience makes him one of the finest actors in the business today. “What I find most refreshing about him is that in spite of all the success he has had over the years, he still has a huge amount of hunger, almost like a newcomer, to excel at whatever he does. I don’t know where it comes from, but it is very heartening for every filmmaker because it makes their work easier,” he says. “As far as his performances are concerned, it is almost like what you expect from a classical vocalist who has trained for several years before performing in public.”
Chaubey says that though OTT has created a unique niche for actors like him, it is not as if Bajpayee would not have got his due without the advent of OTT. “He was already successful even before OTT came along,” he points out. “I think what OTT has done is that it has provided the filmmakers and the talents the opportunities to work on different kinds of material. That is also why actors like Manoj are getting a huge amount of popularity. Movies had, in any case, become so much of a spectacle with weekend collections that to tell character-oriented stories had become difficult. The audience has woken up to the fact that entertainment does not mean only song and dance sequences in colourful costumes.”
Further elaborating, Raj Nidimoru of the Raj & DK duo, the director of TFM, says that Bajpayee is too meticulous about his preparations as well. “He is always chatting and joking around the sets and, as a director, you wonder if he has come prepared for the shoot, but the moment he does the first take, you realise that he is more than prepared.” Raj says when Season 2 of TFM started, Bajpayee came to him to discuss how he could bring something new to the character of Srikant Tiwari. “Even though it was a sequel and he was playing the same character, he still wanted to come up with new ideas. That shows his dedication to his craft,” he says. Raj says that they chose Bajpayee for the character of Srikant Tiwari simply because his range is phenomenal. “Also, everybody can connect with him. We did not want a hero like James Bond. We wanted an Indian James Bond of sorts who was an average middle-class guy doing a government job to counter terrorism, with home loans and other family issues at home. We thought Manoj was a perfect combination of everything we needed.”
Los Angeles-based first-time director Deepesh Jain, who worked with him in Gali Guleiyan (2018), says that Bajpayee not only lost weight for the character over two-and-a-half months, but also isolated himself completely from the rest of the world. “Even during the shoot, he talked only to me and an assistant director. He literally lived the part, wearing the same dirty clothes, sitting on the streets in his get-up with no one recognising him,” he says. “I joked with him that he is India’s answer to Daniel Day-Lewis. He is not one of the best in India, but in the world.” Deepesh says when he had shown his script to his mentors in Los Angeles and Germany, they told him that it would be tough to find an actor who could pull off its lead character who does not speak. “I was nervous that if Manoj would not agree to do it, I might not be able to find another actor for the role,” he admits.
Nonetheless, regardless of the rise and rise of Bajpayee and other actors of his ilk, will the star system spring back to its past glory and push them away from the limelight once Bollywood returns to normal in post-pandemic times? Industry watchers do not think so. National Award-winning film writer Vinod Anupam says the audience has tasted blood now. “The audience has had enough of the larger-than-life movies. They want realistic content and realistic characters that they can instantly relate to,” he says. “Unless there is something spectacular like Baahubali (2015/17), they are unlikely to go back to the theatres to see the same kind of movies that they saw earlier.”
Anupam thinks that superstars like Salman, Akshay or Shah Rukh may not be able to reverse the trend since the emergence of OTT has certainly brought about an irreversible change. He says that the new-found superstardom of actors like Bajpayee could also be attributed to their on- and off-screen persona. “They play the everyman not only in their reel life, but also in their real life. You can see Manoj’s pictures with his farmer-father in his village or Pankaj Tripathi’s photo of doing utensils in his kitchen going viral. The audiences not only relate to their characters, but also see their reflection in their own lives, unlike yesteryear superstars who created a superficial aura around them by keeping away from the real world.”
Whether the OTT boom lasts or busts, an actor like Bajpayee is not going to be irrelevant with his ability to get into the skin of his characters and his unflagging urge to excel. After Satya, Mahesh Bhatt had famously equated his stellar act to Diego Maradona’s performance in the 1986 World Cup soccer, hinting that he would not be able to surpass what he did in Satya. But he has since continued to outdo himself over and over again. That is what defines Manoj Bajpayee, not the new monikers that seem to be threatening to make him part of the same hierarchy that he unfailingly challenged with his acting prowess all the time.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Method Hero")
