Sukant Goel, the current favourite of directors like Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap and Vasan Bala, knows how to get your emotions in a twist. The stage and film actor’s skill—as demonstrated in the recent Monica, O My Darling—is in drawing the viewer in with his diminutive everyman vibe.
Until that is, someone turns the knife. This happens unforgettably in the opening scene of Monica, as Goel’s face, soft and reassuring at first, contorts and trembles in violent jealousy. His earlier outings in films such as Ghost Stories, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, Dobaaraa also have similar shades.
“There’s a lot of nascent violence I observe in people around me,” says the actor, who looks nothing like the dorky non-entities he plays on screen.
Since the last decade, Goel has been the little man on the edges of our films, in contrast to his established stardom as a theatre actor-director. Earlier this year, he endured multiple slaps in the Ranveer Singh-led comedy Jayeshbhai Jordaar.
“Once the shot was done, Ranveer sent a bottle of Thums-up for my troubles.” His next is a series set in the Andamans. Kashyap—who directed him in Dobaaraa this year and is a fan of his theatre work—also has a web show planned with him.
Muzaffarnagar-born (Uttar Pradesh) Goel, started his career as a chemical engineer in Ivory Coast, only to return to India in 2009 to pursue acting.
“There was a lot of misguided ambition in me,” he laughs, adding, “I wanted to be a star. But living in Mumbai and attending Satyadev Dubey’s theatre workshop, changed all that. Though I still had films on my mind, I got into theatre passionately.”
There’s a subtle contradiction about the actor. On stage, he’s known for performing advanced, avant-garde, absurdist theatre. But look him up on YouTube and a different sort of actor emerges.
He has mimicked Salman Khan in a viral video for the YouTube channel, The Screen Patti. Another video, ‘Every Non-Veg Lover Ever’, for content sharing platform, FilterCopy, went even wilder.
He’s also the best thing about the first season of The Better Half, a low-rent sketch series stringing together a bunch of good-humoured wife jokes.
The 34-year-old first worked with Banerjee on Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar in 2021. Appearing for just a couple of scenes, he all but stole it as a ‘baby-faced’ bank manager who pounces on Parineeti Chopra’s corporate rogue.
When the film, shot in 2018, got stuck, the filmmaker called him back for another script. This became Ghost Stories (on Netflix), one of his finest performances. Attempting horror for the first time, Goel drew on his years of doing physical theatre. “I’d done a children’s play called James and the Giant Peach based on Roald Dahl’s story. It helped me figure out timing and tempo.”
What makes him tick as an actor? “Coming from a small town, I did not have access to a lot of things. It made me insecure. Acting is a way to overcome that”, says the actor, who is yet to shoulder meaty, paradigm-altering parts in films. But once you’ve seen a Sukant Goel performance, no matter how small or ancillary, it’s hard to shake it off your mind.