TRUE TO CHARACTER

At 59, actor Sanjay Mishra, with his easy portrayal of distinct roles, has finally arrived

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

On a pleasant Friday afternoon, exactly a week after the release of Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus—the last big-budget Bollywood film of 2022—actor Sanjay Mishra receives a notification on his phone. His face lights up on reading it; his eyes well up; and he goes silent for a while. It is an article on a popular website that says, ‘Sanjay Mishra is the real hero in Cirkus, not Ranveer Singh’.

For someone who spent more than half of his nearly 30-year-long career graduating from bit parts to supporting roles, this is huge. In the side role of a maverick father to Jacqueline Fernandez’s Bindu, Mishra’s live wire energy outshone that of an effervescent Ranveer Singh’s, who failed to sizzle despite a double role. Mishra’s character of Rai Bahadur—wealthy, flashy and motormouthed—stood out as the only promising comic act in Cirkus, a remake of Angoor (1982) that was based on William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.

In stark contrast to Rai Bahadur is the retired schoolteacher Shambhunath Mishra from Vadh, a film that released barely two weeks before Cirkus and had Mishra playing the protagonist alongside Neena Gupta. Using his casual, unassuming naturalness, Mishra takes the audience through the emotional upheavals that turn a soft-spoken teacher into a cold-blooded murderer.