As he waits by the staircase of a building while his teammates sweep it for a terror suspect, secret agent Srikant Tiwari gets a call from his wife. She is angry at him for cutting off their conversation mid-way the previous night to attend to an urgent work call. She thinks he is a regular government employee with a desk job. As for Tiwari, he is determined to be committed both to his family and his country.
While he is on the phone with his wife, the terror suspect shoots past him. Tiwari gives chase but is unable to catch up. He tries to flag down passing vehicles; he is not in uniform so no one stops. Finally, a lady on a scooter halts when he tells her that the man is running offwith his wife’s mangalsutra. It is a humorous scene and Manoj Bajpayee as Tiwari in Amazon Prime Video’s new 10-episode series, The Family Man, is funny even while he essays a serious character. Like his role as an insurance salesman-cum-serial killer in Ram Gopal Varma’s Kaun (1999), to which he brought a certain comical undertone. But then, he was the villain in that one while he is the hero in his latest.
The jokes work at every instance. Bajpayee’s performance has freshness, even though he has played intelligence agents and cops a couple of times before. Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru, the creators of the show, realised that he had not done anything that had a humorous undertone. They were not sure of his response when they showed him the script. But within 20 minutes of going through it, Bajpayee said yes. “And then he internalised the character so well that it was difficult to separate Manoj from Tiwari during the shoot,” says D.K. He feels that Bajpayee coming from the same middle-class milieu as Tiwari helped them convince him.
“He got the graph of the character,” says Nidimoru. “He understood his dilemma and the politics that we were referring to.”
This story is from the September 22, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
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This story is from the September 22, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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