Vijay Varma And The Perks And Perils Of The Bombay Hustle

In early 2018, when Vijay Varma walked into the Santacruz office of Excel Entertainment, he didn’t know what to expect. He had a meeting with Zoya Akhtar who’d liked his Gully Boy audition for the part of Moeen, a worn-out petty criminal from Dharavi, and protagonist Murad’s close friend. A few minutes after he walked in, Akhtar pulled out a camera and asked him to perform the same scene he’d enacted during the audition – the one in which Moeen is behind bars and Murad comes to visit him. While holding back tears, he tells Murad he’ll take the fall for the carjacking and that Murad shouldn’t get involved with the cops. If Murad doesn’t get this chance to follow his dreams, he could easily turn into another Moeen.

- ANKUR PATHAK

Varma was caught off guard. He took a minute. In that minute, he summoned ten years of his own struggle in Mumbai: the repeated rejections and months spent waiting for the phone to ring and a role to come by. Sleepless nights followed by more sleepless nights.

He collected those moments in his head and his face began to resemble an expression of thwarted ambition. In that moment, as he morphed into Moeen and talked about broken dreams, Varma knew he was actually auditioning to preserve his own.

A few days later, his manager Manpreet Bacchhar gave him the news that he’d been locked for the part. After the initial euphoria of landing an A-list project died down, he wondered: What if he was reduced to a sidekick?

“I was coming from a lot of failure,” Varma says, as he sips on a cold coffee at Mumbai’s Soho House. Wearing an oversized sweatshirt and loose denim trousers, Varma is currently in the midst of filming a Reema Kagti police drama, Fallen, for Netflix. “I knew the only way you can matter is when you have more to do.”

But his fears were quelled when he saw the attention his part was being given: from the costume to the make-up to the dialogue. What may have seemed obvious to a mainstream actor was new to Varma, who’d so far been doing smaller, mostly forgettable, indie films such as Chittagong (2012), Rangrezz (2013) and Gang Of Ghosts (2014).

So elated was Varma after landing Chittagong, his debut film, he got himself discharged from Mumbai’s Nanavati Hospital, where he was recovering from dengue, to show up in time for a meeting with the film’s director, Bedabrata Pain, the next day. To his disappointment, the film didn’t quite ignite his career.