How Hathoda haunted us, 100 per cent!

Journalists are often accused of monetising access As in eventually switching over to careers they favourably cover mdash politics entertainment etc It may be disservice to their core job While legal is it ethicalActor Abhishek Banerjee casting director for the brilliant webseries Paatal Lok 2020 Prime Videomdashwho technically cast himself as its main villain serial killer with a hammer lsquoHathodarsquo Tyagi mdash evidently went through a similar kinda tonguewagging about itldquoIt was an accusation then itrsquos a debate now And I see where itrsquos coming from having been on the other side as an aspiring actor myselfrdquo Banerjee 40 tells meAs per him generally ldquosuccess has two meanings lineage or corruption Itrsquos difficult for people to accept any other wayrdquoTo be fair to Banerjee the role he was eyeing in Paatal Lok is actually the hero Hathiram Choudharyrsquos Jaydeep Ahlawat buddycop Imran Ansari played by the securely quiet Ishwak SinghPaatal Lokrsquos creator Sudeep Sharma told Banerjee ldquoYour eyes lack the innocence for the partrdquoItrsquos when Sharma was watching Banerjee as the altogether oppositely framed goofy Jana in Stree in the theatre that he texted him to test for the insanely dark Hathoda Tyagi insteadldquoI donrsquot know what Sudeep sawrdquo Banerjee recalls but he ldquocracked the auditionrdquo Which is something Banerjee was clearly not good at mdash ever since he moved to Mumbai to pursue acting in films but setting up a casting company in order to carry on as a working Bollywood professional for eight years stillNo major role came his wayHis firm Casting Bay was among the first to concentrate on fresh recruits for webseries around 2016 a new medium mdash ldquowidening the talent pool for untested actors since mainstream cinema had space for nonerdquoOn his part Banerjee would show up in sketchesshows for the YouTube collective TVF Thatrsquos where the more exciting work on scriptsideas were going on anywayAs against offstream commercial Bollywood that got stuck in a rut post the new wave with edgier content mdash featuring filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma Anurag Kashyap Dibakar Banerjee Vishal Bharadwaj et al mdash exploded into the scene back in the late rsquo90s early 2000sThose directorsrsquo works had drawn Banerjee to Mumbai ldquoTheir coteries were full thoughrdquo he says The newer voices were only emerging onlineBanerjee is an explayer As in he belongs to Players the theatre society of Delhi Universityrsquos Kirori Mal College KMC mentored for almost ldquofive decadesrdquo by its English literature professor one Keval AroraItrsquos hardly acknowledged locally in Bollywood that the relatively littleknown KMC could be the IITIIM for mainstream actorsConsider its alumni as Banerjee lists it ldquofrom Amitabh Bachchan Kulbhushan Kharbanda Shakti Kapoor Satish Kaushik to directors Kabir Khan Ali Abbas Zafar Victor Vijay Krishna Acharya writer Himanshu Sharma lyricist Raj Shekhar to contemporary actors Sushant Singh Mohd Zeeshan Ayub Divyendu SharmahelliprdquoI add late Manoj Kumar to the roster One such Ashish Khare PlayersKMC alumnus was the casting agent for Stree that brought Banerjee instant fame through his character Jana given multiple offshoots in the lsquoMaddock HorrorComedy Universersquo with Bhediya Munjya Stree for franchisesAlthough itrsquos for Hathoda Tyagi that Banerjee is likely to be most rememberedFor one while Hindi cinema has had a prominent pantheon of pureevil villains forever Hathoda could be the first proper Hindi OTT villain with a short yet strong omnipresenceAlso so viscerally menacing that he could be the nightmare many may actually stay away from the show forAs it is Paatal Lok premiered during the pandemic When Banerjee read its script he didnrsquot know what to do with a ldquorole that had no dialoguesrdquo He thought of bulking up But thatrsquod be too obviousFor inspiration Banerjee looked at Kevin Spaceyrsquos similarly cold part John Doe in David Fincherrsquos Se7en 1995 And the equally chilling Cameron Britton lsquoCoEd Killerrsquo from Joe Penhallrsquos Netflix series Mindhunter 2017 also produced by FincherTo get to Hathoda though Banerjee says ldquohe had to make a deeper connection with the actual Vishal Tyagi How do you generate empathy for such a socially excluded person Let him smile for a dog in jail establishing he could still be more earthy than manyrdquoThatrsquos an iconic scene from Paatal Lok My favourite is his killer school backstoryThe toughest for Banerjee was the scene between Hathoda submitting before his Guruji ldquoIrsquom far from that person I had to imagine being vulnerable before my mother Returning from shoot I was crying at the moment of epiphany with my wife Tina Noronha in the carrdquoThis marriage apparently ldquowent down southrdquo briefly once Banerjee developed angermanagement issues after playing the childrapist Dhavle in Devashish Makhijarsquos Ajji 2017The couple left the city together for a month to get some respite To cover up for expenses upon return Banerjee picked up the minor but effective role of the razorwielding emotionallynumb lsquoCompounderrsquo Subodh in Mirzapur 2018You can hence sense his natural trajectory leading up to Hathoda Only this time he was sure to master the craft of detaching self from roleIt helped that almost at the beginning of Paatal Lokrsquos shoot they first shot the ending scene of Hathodarsquos deathHaving got a handle on Hathoda Banerjee says he first killed him in his head before playing him on the screenMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass cultureHe tweets mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper