He raged on to the silver screen 27 years ago, on a roaring hot bike in the action drama, ‘Phool Aur Kaante’. Ever since, his career has not always been a bed of roses, but neither have the thorns left him bruised. Like he says, “Even in my low phase, I have always had one hit in a year”.
Ajay Devgn has deftly balanced the art and the mart. For every ‘Zakhm’, there has been a ‘Golmaal’. For every 100-crore-hit, there’s been a critically acclaimed drama to root for. A director’s delight — he could tear the screen with rage or turn into silent dynamite. Off-screen, he’s a man of his own mind. Rare and solid. He doesn’t say much, but when he does, he fires bullets — direct and dauntless.
He plays a tough-as-nails IT officer in ‘Raid’, who is investigating one of the most high-profile and controversial cases. In an interview with Times Now, he says, “the film happened because we met this IT officer and realized that there was a great story to be told. In ‘Raid’, Amay Patnaik is real; he doesn’t become aggressive or resort to violence. He is not a cop, he is an IT officer who is honest and retaliates silently.
You have always said that you don’t spend too much time getting into the skin of the character. Have you ever made an exception?
I still can’t do all that prep work. I am just spontaneous, so I either feel the character or I don’t. I don’t know of any other process, or let’s say that I can’t explain it. I can understand it for myself. I start thinking and feeling like the character. My body language and thought process change and I start thinking what the character would do or wouldn’t do. Yes, I do put a lot of thought in to how I would play a character differently. For instance, after Ram Gopal Varma’s ‘Company’ (2002) got a lot of appreciation, I had to think about how I would play an underworld don again in Milan Luthria’s ‘Once Upon A Time In Mumbaai’ (2010). The cop in Prakash Jha’s ‘Gangaajal’ (2003) is dramatically different from the cop in Rohit Shetty’s ‘Singham’ (2011), though both the characters have similar beliefs.
When you are doing a film like ‘Golmaal’ vis-à-vis a film like ‘Raid’, as an actor, is the ultimate feeling of creative satisfaction similar?
There is a lot of satisfaction in doing both kinds of films. Doing a comedy is tough business, the energy and timing has to be perfectly tuned. People think that it is easy to be stupid on screen, but it is not. I realized that while working on ‘Golmaal Again’ (2017). On the first day of the shoot we performed a few scenes and we realized that there was something missing. We had shot the last ‘Golmaal’ movie seven years ago. Since then, we had all grown up.
Then Rohit (Shetty, director) played a few scenes from ‘Golmaal 3’, and we saw how stupid we were in that film. The energy was on a different level. And while shooting ‘Golmaal Again’, we were trying to be stupid, but there was a little maturity in it. So, we had to take the stupidity a notch higher and when that worked, it was as satisfying as anything else.
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