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Manoj Bajpayee is among the most respected Indian actors of his generation, and over the course of his career, he has also established himself as a major presence in mainstream films, in addition to his work in offbeat cinema. But he also uses his credibility to lend support to up-and-coming directors, to the point that he has stopped working with established filmmakers.
During a discussion at the Arth Culture Fest, he spoke about working with new directors because they’ve grown up on a diet of international cinema, and their sensibilities aren’t defined only by Hindi movies. He said in Hindi, “It’s been years since I stopped working with famous directors. I would try and work with new voices, who were telling stories in new ways. This is how I ended up doing films like Budhia Singh, Gangs of Wasseypur, Missing, Special 26, Gali Guleyan, Rukh, Bhosle, and now Joram and Gulmohar.”
He continued, “The reason I want to work with new directors is that these people are young, they have new ideas. Their expectations from their actors are completely different. As an actor, I always want to keep evolving, and this bothers me. If I keep working with older filmmakers, I won’t evolve. These new directors have grown up on world cinema. They haven’t grown up watching only Hindi films. They watch Malayalam films, they watch Tamil films, they watch Telugu films, they watch European films, American films. This is good for me, because they challenge me, they bother me, they don’t let me sleep. They want me to distance myself from what I’ve done in the past.”
The actor does, however, work on mainstream films with established Bollywood directors. In recent years, he has appeared in movies such as Baaghi 2, Mrs Serial Killer, and Satyameva Jayate.
Manoj Bajpayee broke out in Bollywood after starring in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya. He gained further fame with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, and more recently, he attained the peak of his fame with the Prime Video series The Family Man. He will be seen in the Disney+ Hotstar film Gulmohar this Friday.
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