Sanjay Mishra | Amey Mansabdar
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.
It is in this realm, this broad range of emotions from the eccentricity of a comic to the angst of an old father, that Mishra thrives as an actor. “The point is to never deliver a false moment,” he says, pulling a cigarette out of an ornamental case. “To immerse myself into the character to the extent that I am no longer me; I am only the manifestation of the character. That genuineness comes out on screen because the camera is nobody’s friend. It can call out a fake even without you knowing it.”
As the conversation chugs along, so do the puffs. We are seated on a mattress on the floor inside his minimalistic yet beautifully done studio space in Mumbai’s Versova. The space overlooks the calming and meditative swell of the Arabian Sea. “An artiste must stay at a place that boasts a high aesthetic sense,” he says. “I am very creative when it comes to cooking a meal and designing a space. It is here that I read scripts and kind of channelise my energy.”
Mishra, 59, entered the industry in 1991 at a time when Shah Rukh Khan was doing Idiot, a television series, and Salman Khan was riding on the success of his evergreen film, Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989). Unlike the Khans, who are just two years younger to him, Mishra is only now tasting success.
Producers are now willing to bet their money on films helmed by Mishra. “That is happening now,” says Ankur Garg, who produced Vadh. “It is the time of the method actor who quite literally is the character and knows how to bring a story alive on screen.”
And, playing a character is what has excited Mishra all along, be it during his village theatre days in Darbhanga, Bihar, or in plays at school or family gatherings or in drama school or cinema. He never really “fit into the typical definition of a Bollywood hero”. There were times when his roommates who were actors were taller, fairer and better built than him, and he would feel out of place. “Even today, I do not want to play a hero,” he says. “I am here to play a character on whom the entire film is based. Let people know you from the characters you essay, if that happens, then you have truly arrived.” And, that is what has worked for Mishra―characters that become etched in time and even turn into memes (‘Dhondu, just chill’ from Shetty’s All The Best).
That does not mean that he was picky when it came to roles. “I simply went on doing whatever I got, never chose,”he says. “Because it was also important to sustain myself financially here in Bombay. I know so many actors who came during the time of Amitabh Bachchan but couldn’t make much of themselves.”
Mishra has lost count of the number of films he has done so far, just like he has lost count of the number of times he has failed a certain class. The only real education, he says, happened at the National School of Drama, where he met contemporaries like Irrfan Khan, Kumud Mishra and Saurabh Shukla―all of whom have brought in their “distinct and indigenous nuance to acting”.
Alongside his own talent and luck, Mishra agrees that a lot of credit goes to the directors and storytellers who came to him with the roles. When Tigmanshu Dhulia, a close friend, offered Mishra the role of a blind man in Charas (2004), he told him that till date only one person had played the role of a blind man in Hindi cinema―A.K. Hangal as Imam Saheb in Sholay (remember Itna sannata kyun hain bhai?). “So he wanted me to make an impact with something as simple as that,” says Mishra.
The journey from being referred to as ‘Sanjay’ to ‘Sanjay Sir’ has been a long one. “Now, on the sets, they don’t ask me to memorise my dialogues,” he says. “I think that has been the biggest change and I have earned it. Now they know that I have a unique way of delivering my lines and most of the time it works well.” The one thing, says film buff Kalpana Iyer, that connects all his films is his “typically local Bihari dialect, which gives his characters the flavour and the context”. to Google my name,” he recalls. “My face had value, but now people know me by my name, too.”
Mishra speaks in Hindi, animatedly and with humour. His affability translates on sets, too. Once, as the shot was getting ready, Mishra took to cooking okra while listening to Raag Malhar and lighting a few incense sticks to “create a vibe”.
And, he ‘vibes’ with a script by listening to the director’s narration, not by reading it. “I want to see the film play out in the eyes of the director,” says Mishra. “If the director can convince me, then I am in.”