Vicky Kaushal is riding high with the back to back success of Raazi, Lust Stories and Sanju. He has emerged not only as a fine acting talent, but also as a box-office draw. Ahead of his new release Manmarziyaan, he gets chatty about dealing with stardom, working with Anurag Kashyap and his love for the craft of acting.
Q. Vicky, you seem to be on a roll with Raazi, Lust stories, Sanju and now Manmarziyaan. Do you find that the more successful you are, the more distanced you get from reality?
Vicky Kaushal: No, I haven’t felt it till now. Probably it hasn’t sunk in yet that there have been these successes. I still feel like I’m in that transit mode where I’m yet to arrive. That I feel is a beautiful phase, because that desperation and that fire is still inside me. I try to treat every film I do as my debut film, keep myself as uncontaminated as possible as an actor when I get into a new film.
Q. What I mean is that does success alienate you from living a ‘real’ life, because those are the experiences that helped you create rooted characters in films like Masaan and Raazi?
Vicky: No, in that sense I don’t really feel any change in myself or in my surroundings. Success can be intoxicating, but it depends on how you think of it. I don’t take it for granted, I take it as a phase. I take it as a visitor. There’s a beautiful line in a poem called If by Rudyard Kipling, that treat success and failure as two imposters. Treat them in the same manner. What’s permanent is what I’m doing today. The joy of being an actor is what I thrive for and that’s where my focus is. I know I’m an actor only between action and cut, that’s where my job starts and ends.
I don’t take myself too seriously as an actor because when somebody praises you, it is a compliment for the entire team, not just for me.Vicky Kaushal, Actor
If I didn’t have that writer penning those great lines or that fabulous director directing me in a manner that really made the audience cry or feel a particular emotion, no matter how wonderfully I acted it wouldn’t register. When you have that kind of a reality check you don’t take yourself too seriously.
Q. Is this innate sense of success and failure influenced by the fact that your father (reputed action director Sham Kaushal) has been in the industry for years?
Vicky: The kind of upbringing that my brother and I have had is that my parents never shied away from letting us experience the harsh reality while growing up. We know how every piece of furniture or anything in our house has come.
My father has shared his moments of humiliation and struggle with us. That prepared us when we entered the industry because we knew it wasn’t some ‘la la land’. It demands a lot of hard work, sincerity and sacrifice, only then can you expect some reward.
Also as someone who was coming from a small town to become an actor, my father’s passion was far more superior than what I have, because he’s already probably fought his family and surroundings and really made them believe in his passion and then came here. I have my family to support me emotionally and financially. I also have a roof above my head, I will get food no matter what I earn. That’s my advantage, so I need to put in a lot more effort - treat the advantage as a leaping board.
Q. But it has been a step-by-step process for you, from Masaan to Raman Raghav 2.0 to Raazi.
Vicky: Yes it has. In fact, Masaan onwards it has been an easier journey but before that it was very hard. My journey started in 2009 when I graduated as an engineer with a job that I didn’t take up. I chose to become an actor and did a six-month acting course in Mumbai just to be sure that this wasn’t a hobby. Post that I got an opportunity to be an assistant director on Gangs of Wasseypur. While I was doing that, I met the fabulous actors of that film and realised the importance of ‘theatre’ in an actor’s life. I started doing theatre with Naseer saab, Manav Kaul and this was at a time when I wasn’t earning, so I was travelling by buses and trains. I was doing backstage work, production stuff and just everything I could do. After that I started giving auditions, knocking on doors.
The first hurdle was that you don’t even know where the auditions take place. Every time you reach some place for an audition there are already some hundred people waiting in queue.
What I had firmly decided was that I will not sit at home.
Acting is a practising art, so you have to be on the field. That understanding actually came from my experience with engineering. After four years of studying, I didn’t know how to repair a television or even a small battery-run machine!
So that was the journey.... But now when I look back at that time, it really scares me.
Q. But all those experiences become raw material for you as an actor right?
Vicky: Absolutely. The great thing about acting is that no experience goes waste.
We are such selfish people as actors that even when you’re going through a heartbreak and you’re crying, there’s a parallel being who is witnessing you being sad. You find that you’re telling yourself ‘Oh this is how it feels to be sad, this is what I look like, this is how you cry’. There is this alter ego who is always monitoring how you behave.
Q. The journey has been pretty incredible for you from assisting Anurag (Kashyap) on Gangs of Wasseypur to now working with him on Manmarziyaan. The trailer looks very intense, is that what attracted you? That it’s not your run-of-the-mill rom-com?
Vicky: I really wanted to collaborate with Aanand L. Rai and there have been talks for other films but nothing really worked out. When Manmarziyaan came my way, I fell in love with the script. We have all grown up watching love triangles, but the treatment is new, the world is is new, the characters are fresh. While I’ve seen numerous love stories, I hadn’t really done one, so as an actor it was very new. This is also because of the part I play - Vicky my character is the most vibrant person I have played till now. He’s impulsive and eccentric and I haven’t done that. So that was one of the things I was looking forward to, and then I got to know that Anurag was directing it. Then I was convinced that its going to be a completely different take on a love story and something I cannot foresee.
Q. Karan Johar had said that when you’re shooting with Anurag you don’t even know where the camera has been kept and that frees you as an actor. What kind of an edge do you think Anurag brought to Manmarziyaan?
Vicky: Anurag is a very organic and impulsive director. On a given day he’d know what we needed to shoot but not how we should shoot it. He’d go on set have a look at the space, lights etc and then say “Okay bring the actors, we’ll design something.” As an actor I’m aware that tomorrow I have to do a four-page scene happening in a kitchen and so in your head you have some visuals. Then you reach the set and come to know that the scene is going to happen on the street in the middle of traffic and these two characters are walking.
He’s (Anurag Kashyap) the only director I have worked with wherein if you go on set prepared, you’re actually on the back-foot. You have to keep the character in your head and heart and just surrender to him.
Q. You’ve worked with Anurag on Raman Raghav which was much darker and grittier. Do the instructions differ for a love story like Manmarziyaan?
Vicky: With Anurag sir, you cannot take the filmmaker out of him. His personal self and the filmmaker cannot be separated. I’ve seen him giggling when he was shooting Manmarziyaan, and dancing behind the monitor. And I told him that the last time I saw him like that was when we were shooting Gangs of Wasseypur. That energy reflects in the film he is making.
This film is also an amalgamation of two worlds- Anurag Kashyap and Aanand L. Rai. Them coming together has led to the Manmarziyaan that you will see.
Also it’s very rare that Anurag works on the writing of another person. Kanika Dhillon has written this script and he’s directing her writing which again gives a different perspective. Its a burst of flavors and I think you can see that in the trailer or at least I hope you can.
Q. You’ve had very distinct looks for your characters in films, whether it was in Masaan or Sanju or now in Manmarziyaan. Does vanity ever get the better of you?
Vicky: No it doesn’t. In Masaan I was a few shades darker, I was not in great shape and that was my first big film. So it’s not a concern at all. All I care about is that I should look and become the character I’m playing. I don’t want to be perfect and that is a part of my acting process also.
The first thing I do is find out what the imperfections of the character I’m playing are. I have never met a perfect person and it’s the flaws that make them real. Even with dialogues, I don’t want to say them very fluently, so the character seems like someone who isn’t comfortable with expressing his thoughts through his words. It’s a small thing but it makes that person seem more real and relatable.
Q. One of my favourite scenes of yours is the drunk scene with Paresh Rawal in Sanju. Apparently you actually had a few pegs before you did that scene. What was the process like for Manmarziyaan, how did you get into Vicky Sandhu’s (the character) head?
Vicky: I believe that he is my alter ego, he’s there inside me. Not in aspiration but hidden. If you play a Punjabi song, you’d see a Vicky Sandhu right now. But it was so liberating to play him because somewhere my alter ego needed expression.
It’s like the person you usually see is the Clark Kent and Vicky Sandhu is the Superman. I had to rip open my shirt to let Superman out and that is so freeing. Anurag wanted me to unleash that part of my personality and let it flow.
Q. You’ve signed Karan Johar’s magnum opus Takht, but what else are you looking forward to?
Vicky: There’s Uri which I have almost finished.. That film has really taken a toll on me because it’s my first action film. So the preparation was intense to get into the role of an army guy, but a great experience. Then Takht is happening, which is again like a dream come true. Everyone always asked me what my dream role was and I always said a part in a period drama, which is happening now with an amazing team. I’m really grateful to Karan for choosing me for that. There are few other announcements that will happen by the end of the month and I’m very excited for those. Particularly one because its a very new genre for me, so fingers crossed!