From IITian to Ramsay Brothers’ Samri: A medical twist turned him into India’s ultimate horror icon, heroine fainted after seeing him

He was suddenly diagnosed with a tumour in his pituitary gland, which caused facial and limb deformities due to hormonal imbalance. The man once considered strikingly handsome began to look, in his own words, “terrifying.” “Girls would randomly get scared of me whenever they spotted me,” Anirudh said in an interview with Bollywood Crypt.

With that, his dreams of becoming a conventional leading man seemed shattered. But much like the iconic dialogue from Om Shanti Om, “Kehte hain agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho toh puri kainaat usse tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai,” the universe had something else in store for him.

Actress Anita Sarin and Anirudh Agarwal in film BANDH DARWAZA. (Photo: Express Archive)

A well-wisher suggested he meet the Ramsay Brothers, pioneers of the Hindi horror genre. He took the advice. Recalling their first meeting, Deepak Ramsay told Shreshth Bharat, “One day, he walked into the office. When he opened the door, for the first few minutes, people couldn’t take their eyes off him. Nobody had seen such a gigantic figure in a long time. His personality was very powerful.”

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Tulsi Ramsay immediately signed him for Purana Mandir. Much of the film had already been shot, but they were still searching for the right actor to play the character of Samri. They did not want to compromise. When Anirudh walked in, they were spellbound.

The Ramsay Brothers were known for delivering blockbuster hits on modest budgets, but the effort behind these films was immense. Deepak Ramsay revealed that the film was shot in Mahabaleshwar and that Anirudh’s makeup alone would take nearly eight hours. If the shoot was scheduled for 2 PM, he would begin getting ready at 7 in the morning.

One particularly memorable incident from the sets involved the film’s heroine, Aarti Gupta. She had not met Anirudh before their scene together. When she arrived on set and went to his dimly lit makeup room, she found him fully transformed into Samri. On turning around and seeing his towering, horrifying figure, she screamed and fainted.

“When she regained consciousness, she asked, ‘What is this thing? How do we work with this thing?’” Deepak recalled. “We were worried about completing the film, but we did — and it became a cult classic.”

Anirudh himself later shared his version of the story, saying he had stepped out of the washroom when she saw him and screamed so loudly that he was startled too. “I didn’t even touch her. I got scared of the whole situation,” he said, adding that the atmosphere itself felt haunted.

Amit Ramsay also remembered being terrified as a child when he first saw Anirudh. “His face was so frightening that I still have nightmares,” he admitted. Even years later, the memory lingers.

With the Ramsay Brothers, Anirudh finally lived his dream. He went on to appear in Saamri and Bandh Darwaza, among others. However, as the Ramsays transitioned from films to television, acting opportunities for Anirudh declined. He later appeared in Bandit Queen, Mela starring Aamir Khan, and Talaash: The Hunt Begins… featuring Akshay Kumar. But his strong association with horror limited the variety of roles he was offered.

“I was so popular in horror films that I couldn’t get roles in other genres,” he told Bollywood Crypt. “I did small roles, like that of a fighter, in many films.”

While shooting Bandh Darwaza, where he played a vampire, Anirudh once nearly lost his life. During a coffin scene, the space left for him to breathe was mistakenly sealed shut. The coffin was soundproof. He kept shouting, but no one heard him. It was only when someone finally opened it that he was rescued. “I could have died,” he said.

Interestingly, despite his on-screen horror persona, Anirudh claimed to have experienced something eerie in real life as a child. “I am an educated man, so I shouldn’t be saying this,” he shared. “But when I was a child, my entire family experienced an outside entity in our hometown. One night, my mother started screaming, ‘Get out of my house.’ I was just 10. We believed she could see something unseen. My father later told me our house was haunted. I could feel its effect.”

Eventually, as offers dwindled, Anirudh stepped away from acting. Today, he runs his own construction company — a far cry from the dimly lit horror sets where he once became a cult figure. Yet in many ways, he did manifest his dream: he became an actor, just not in the way he had once imagined.