Tasked with the job of portraying the role of a parent who lost his children to the fire at Delhi’s Uphaar Cinema in 1997, Abhay Deol recalls encountering an overwhelming sense of grief. It’s not a situation he could overcome, he says, as he prepares to chronicle on the screen, the struggles that Shekhar Krishnamoorthy faced in his legal battle against the theatre owners, in Trial by Fire. Deol admits that he had to dissociate himself from the grief that he encountered while playing the part of the distraught, yet resilient parent. “It was overwhelming, but at some point you have to put that thought at the back of your mind. That’s what I love about my job — while acting, one can’t think about these things because it is not  relevant to the moment. You become the person [encountering the grief], and that’s the joy in the craft,” he says of the Netflix project that also stars Rajshri Deshpande as his wife. 

A still from the show