With Raid 2, director Raj Kumar Gupta and actor Ajay Devgn take us back to the world of officer Amay Patnaik as he conducts another income tax raid. Quiet and assured, realistic and rooted, Devgn’s Amay is at odds with the larger-than-life characters that he usually plays. How do you strip a superstar of his aura and make him a common man on screen? “Ajay sir can transform into different roles; he can go from being a superhero to an average Joe. The heroism in this film comes purely from the story. It took us some time to get the story right. We started in 2019, chucked many ideas, and finally, in 2022, this one worked out. We wrote it for a year-and-a-half before going to Ajay sir,” he recounts.

Raj Kumar Gupta