THE GOOD BAD

The feral joy of watching Vijay Varma as flawed, devious and all too human

- SNEHA BHURA

Vijay Varma does not have a reserve of malice to dig into. Fast moving centre-stage for playing morally ambiguous characters, the actor often has to grasp criminality and crookedness from random news stories.

Sometime during our interview, he pulls out a courtroom picture of the American serial killer Richard Ramirez, who terrorised southern California in the summer of 1985. So grave and relentless were his crimes that he earned 19 death penalties. Slick, remorseless and completely opaque, Ramirez is the terrifying “night stalker” in the images that Varma holds up on his phone through the Zoom screen. These pictures helped him style the look for Sasya—the fiendish yet charming drug dealer in the Netflix crime drama She, directed by Imtiaz Ali. She premiered in 2020 and the audience loved the sadistic, seductively volatile ways of Sasya, the catalyst in firing up the dormant sexuality of the central character Bhumi—an undercover cop played by Aaditi Pohankar.