Manoj Bajpayee agreed to star in Family Man in 20 minutes, Samantha Ruth Prabhu ‘cracked up’ on his entry in season two, Raj and DK reveal

“We wanted him to be an everyday guy, strong, ambitious, a poor dad, a middle-class man. We wanted an anti-hero, an anti-James Bond. We used to call him James Bond from Chembur,” Raj said. According to DK, Manoj Bajpayee was on board the show in flat 20 minutes.

“When we met Manoj for the first time, we gave him a very long narration of this entire series…. for 20 minutes. We just started talking about the character and he was like, ‘Brilliant, I love it.’ The only thing I told him was that you will be a spy here but let’s not have that moustache! Because he has played a cop before and had that moustache!” DK added.

Raj said Bajpayee is so effortless with his process that people can be easily fooled into believing that he is not prepared. “I always say that Manoj is like that studious student who does a lot of homework–I am sure he does, nobody knows–and he comes to the sets like he has done nothing. Everybody falls for it and is having fun, but then he is acing the scenes. He has read the whole story, he knows where it is heading, the whole thing is imbibed and then he is like a chill guy. He is one of those guys, who know it but it doesn’t look like it.”

To which DK added, “All the co-stars ask him, ‘How do you know this? Did you work through this and figure it out already?’ and he’s like, ‘No, kahani pata hai na…'”

While the first season of The Family Man was released to acclaim in 2019, the second season continued the chronicles of Manoj Bajpayee’s Srikant Tiwari, a middle-class man secretly working as an intelligence officer, as it introduced a new threat: the character of actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu.

Raj said it was the first time he saw the actor “nervous” when they began filming season two as he was trying to wonder how not to make his part repetitive for the audience.

“He was also trying to see what more to add to his character in the second season, because he had never played the same part twice. The first time I ever saw him reflective and nervous was on the first days of season two. I asked him what happened, and he said, ‘I have never played the same character, how is it going to be fresh? It is going to be the same thing again. What can I do to add?’ Which he did. You can’t change the way you act for that character, but you can only think of tweaks and garnishing.”

‘Samantha Ruth Prabhu cracked up on seeing Manoj Bajpayee’

Dk recalled a hilarious anecdote from the shooting when Samantha had to train intensely for an action sequence. While Samantha–in her Hindi debut with The Family Man season two–prepped hard for the sequence, the moment Manoj Bajpayee was on set and delivered the shot, she started laughing, realising that he can win over anyone while being absolutely minimalistic.

“I remember in season two, when we were shooting with Samantha and Manoj was supposed to come in, they hadn’t shot together yet at that point. It was a scene where Samantha had to do a lot of action, so we spent two days rehearsing it, choreographing it, and a lot of effort went into it.

“Manoj’s character enters, sees her, and starts chasing her. In the first take, she cracked up and laughed. She told us, ‘I spent two days doing this, all he does is, comes there and goes ‘hey’ and people are going to love him for it and going to crack up! That’s all he needs to do!’ he added.

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