Popular actor Pankaj Tripathi faced one of the toughest challenges of his career when he was asked to play the role of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the biopic ‘Main Atal Hoon’.
Vajpayee (1924-2018) was a poet and politician who served three terms as Prime Minister. He belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party currently in power in India. Vajpayee, who oversaw India’s nuclear tests, was also known as a diplomat who improved relations with Pakistan, the country’s archrival, and introduced multiple reforms. He was very popular across party lines.
“I’m not good at imitating,” Tripathi said. diverse. The actor’s conflict was how much to imitate Vajpayee and how much to absorb his performance. “How much of his behavior should I keep and how much should I not keep,” Tripathi said.
Tripathi read several books on Vajpayee and watched news clips and speeches. In the end, he decided to adopt the late politician’s body language and mannerisms in all his public confrontation scenes, especially speeches, and provide an in-house performance for the private sequences for which there is no video footage. Even for the speeches, Tripathi says his aim was to get into Vajpayee’s state of mind while delivering them.
“A person’s inner state of mind has no form, so as for how to interpret and implement it, I have no words to describe it,” Tripathi says of his process. “But I felt something during the performance and I hope that is conveyed to the audience.” Reading Vajpayee’s poems also helped, especially the times and circumstances in which he wrote them, says Tripathi. “When you know the timing and thought behind the poetry, you understand the person behind it,” Tripathi said. “After performing Atal-ji, I became more democratic, more polite and a better human being.”
Tripathi studied at the prestigious National School of Drama in India. His breakout role was in Anurag Kashyap’s “Gangs of Wasseypur” (2012) at Cannes, and he also had a prominent role in the hit Netflix series “Sacred Games.” Tripathi’s lead role in Prime Video’s hit series ‘Mirzapur’, which began streaming in 2018 and is now gearing up for its third season, has made him a household name across India as has his Disney+ Hotstar series ‘Criminal Justice’. . He has won awards at the Indian National Film Awards twice, for “Newton” (2017) and “Mimi” (2021) and achieved major commercial success with “OMG2” (2023).
“Main Atal Hoon” directed by Ravi Jadhav (“Natarang”) is now streaming on ZEE5 Global and Tripathi says he is receiving a renewed wave of praise for the film from audiences who missed it during its theatrical release in January.