Pratik Gandhi on Playing a Spy Without the Glamour: 'The Gun is the Most Useless Thing to be Given to a Spy'

When Pratik Gandhi talks about playing Vishnu Shankar in Saare Jahan Se Accha, the first thing he stresses on is how different this world felt from every spy he has grown up watching. “It has been an extremely enriching journey for myself to explore a spy’s world from a different gaze altogether. And not spies like the movies,” he says. 

For Gandhi, the defining idea was invisibility. “The spies are not supposed to evidently be there. They are supposed to be the most common guy that you see anywhere,” he says. It’s the antithesis of the genre’s traditional imagery which usually consists of slow-mo swagger shots and gun drawn silhouettes. Here, it was just someone who could blend into a crowd without ever catching your eye. “It’s also a desk job. All the wars are not fought on the front. Most of them are fought from the office through the mind because data analysis actually is their job,” he adds.

The pivot was clear right from his first meeting with director Sumit Purohit. “He said we are not making those six pack heroes, those who can draw gun anytime, slo-mo walks and can jump from anywhere to anywhere,” Gandhi recalls.

One particular line from those early discussions still stays with him, even though it didn’t make the final cut, “The gun is the most useless thing to be given to a spy. Because the moment he or she has to take out the gun, that means the mission has already failed.”

In a landscape saturated with hyper-stylised espionage, he feels this grounded approach stood apart. “It became a clutter breaker in the cluttering world of spies that has been created in the last few years,” he says. 

Ultimately, it all boiled down to one idea. “The job itself is so heroic, you don’t have to put heroism in your performance,” he says.