Known for his hard-hitting roles and power-packed performances, Pankaj Tripathi made his mark in Bollywood with Anurag Kashyap’s 2012 blockbuster, Gangs of Wasseypur.Donning the role of Sultan Qureshi in the film, Tripathi has since then been associated with offbeat antagonist roles.“This is exactly what I don’t want.
I have been offered such roles for a long time, and the only reason I keep doing the same type of roles is because I need to make a mark in whatever I do. I also want to do a commercial film with lighter roles and main-stream characters,” says the 40-year-old actor. The National School of Drama alumnus will be next seen in National Award winning director Shanker Raman’s Gurgaon. “I play the role of Kehri Singh, who is a farmer but later becomes a builder over the span of 20 years. It is a complex character and has a lot of layers to it,” says the Mumbai-based actor.Tripathi, who began his journey in the film industry in 2004 with a small role in the Abhishek Bachchan-starrer Run, says that Kheri Singh’s role was offered to him by the producer, Ajay G Rai.
“The role was offered to me by Ajay, with whom I worked with before in Nil Battey Sannata. I was then introduced to Shanker Raman who told me the thought behind the script and the film. That is when I decided that I will do this film. I was really impressed by just the thought of the movie, and
I didn’t require a second thought,” he says.
Gurgaon also has Akshay Oberoi, Ragini Khanna and Shalini Vatsa in the lead along with Pankaj Tripathi.
Speaking about his chemistry with his co-actors, he says, “Given my theatre background,
I mingle with people easily. Within hours of our first day of the shoot, I had bonded with each of my co-actors.” Even though he has been typecast with such roles, Tripathi says he has never done a film with so many different emotions. “This character has multiple levels of emotions and is very intense.
Normally, when you write a Bollywood character, it is always one-dimensional. However, this has different dimensions to it and is totally different than the previous roles that I have done till
date,” he concludes.