Pankaj Tripathi delves into his upcoming film Parivarik ManuRanjan, exploring unique relationships and critiquing premature judgments about Bollywood. He reflects on wisdom, evolving audiences, and his grounded approach to acting, emphasizing authenticity over theatrics.
After delivering his iconic role as Kaleen Bhaiya in the havoc-filled Mirzapur: The Movie, Pankaj Tripathi has returned to the screen in a gentler beat with Parivarik ManuRanjan, marking his first-ever collaboration with Aditi Rao Hydari.
Set in a middle-class household in Lucknow, the film sits at the intersection of comedy, family drama and romance, and focuses on a budding relationship between Ranjan Dubey (Tripathi), a man in search for a full-time house help, and Helen (Hydari), who takes up the job.
As Tripathi sits down with The Hollywood Reporter India ahead of the film's release, he opens up about an audience divided over the kinds of stories Bollywood has been creating lately, believing that some form snap opinions about them.
Parivarik ManuRanjan builds on a lesser explored dynamic: that between a man and his homemaker.
Asked whether there is a certain idea of love and the type of relationships the Indian audience has become comfortable seeing on-screen today, Tripathi says, "The audience has grown a lot, but it is also very diverse. One segment may like it a lot, but the other will go, 'What nonsense is this?'. In fact, I read a comment on YouTube recently that went, 'The Bollywood folks are here yet again to show their "evolved" drama'. It's not like that. You haven't seen the film yet, and you can't have expectations only from the trailer about what it's fully going to entail."
From playing roles like the ruthless butcher Sultan Qureshi in Gangs of Wasseypur and the college security guard, Panditji, in the Fukrey franchise, to the witty bookstore owner Rudra Bhaiya in the Stree franchise and the amiable cab driver Bhanu Pratap Pandey in Mimi, Tripathi has constantly shuffled between roles that push the audience to reassess just how versatile he is in his art.
But amidst this, there are things the actor tries to keep constant no matter the roles and set environments he has had to inhabited over the years. "There's a lot of noise, appreciation and humiliation around you when you go on set. But there's no other strategy I have except for just being present there," says Tripathi. "It's not like I have to do something in every scene. I quietly go and stand with honesty, do the bit and come back. I don't even look at the monitor."
This modest and introspective sense of self isn't something Tripathi limits to his on-set self. It's a shift that has taken shape slowly over time and one that, as he has addressed on several occasions over the last couple of years, has come with the eventual understanding that knowledge can exist without having to say it out loud.
“Bol bachchan mai interview mein karta hu” [I do big talk during interviews]," he teases. "I sit here and talk about wisdom and knowledge because its our purpose to talk here. But that’s not the purpose of acting... the purpose [of acting] is to perform.”
He recalls a comment someone left under one of his interviews online (in which he waxed eloquent on many topics) that read: 'Everyone becomes a philosopher when they have money.'
"You know, I had all this wisdom even before I had money itself. It's just that no one interviewed me back then!" he quips.
"So it's not like I gained new wisdom. I was already a philosopher... a poor one. Now I’m a philosopher whose EMI is still running. I’m an EMI philosopher," he chuckles and signs off.