Rajat Kapoor opens up on reprising his role as the ‘cop husband’ in Drishyam 3: ‘There’s no arc, still standing behind Tabu’

Rajat will soon reprise his role of the “cop husband” in Abhishek Pathak’s crime thriller Drishyam 3 next year. He plays the civilian husband of Inspector General Meera Deshmukh (Tabu), torn between the extrajudicial crimes she commits and the quest to find out how their son was murdered. “There’s nothing to crack. I was standing behind Tabu, that’s it,” Rajat says, nonchalantly. But would the threequel give a new bend to his arc? “There’s no arc. I’m still standing behind Tabu,” he adds, laughing.

Adding more to the script

Rajat sounds like he just submits to the script and performs his role as required, without any questions. But he admits there’s always room for improvisation. “You can’t close yourself to that because then you’ve already made your film. The organic process of making a film is to improvise in whatever ways. In all the films I’ve acted in, there’s probably only one film in which the director was so obsessed with what he’d written that he didn’t want one word here to there. Otherwise people are a little more open to it,” he says. When we quiz him on who that rather rigid director is, he shrugs his shoulders and says, “I’ve forgotten!”

Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders is the second time this year that Rajat is working with writer Smita Singh, who previously wrote the memorable role of Hakim for him in Prime Video India horror show Khauf. “I’m a huge fan of her writing in Khauf. She did a great job at making everything into horror and creating characters that will be remembered for a long time. It’s a really difficult job to write a good series, and she did it excellently. So, I was already excited for this one,” says Rajat, adding that he does find a layer of similarity between both the scripts. “The common ground would be her larger social concern, that’s there in Khauf and is also reflected in this one,” he says.

Rajat Kapoor the director

Rajat is busy focusing on acting gigs as direction has taken a backseat. He turned director with the National Award-winning 1994 short film Tarana, and went on to win two more National Awards for Hypothesis (short film, 1996) and Raghu Romeo (2003, Best Feature Film in Hindi). However, his last directorial RK/RKay released in cinemas over three years ago.

“It’s the same old thing. You never have money. I’m not able to release a film I made two years ago. And the next one always takes three years because you have to get the funding for it. But one can be bitter about it or one can say okay, this is what it is. This is the marketspace we live in. You got to keep doing the thing you believe in,” says Rajat.

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The actor-director often took the route of crowdfunding for many of his directorials. But he agrees that forget crowdfunding, the potential audience wouldn’t even pay to watch indie films in theatres today. “There’s no solution. The hope is things will change. You always live in hope. There’s a bleak scenario that independent cinema is going through right now. But in spite of that, people who want to make films are still making films. There are filmmakers like Payal Kapadia (All We Imagine As Light), Rima Das (Village Rockstars), and Prateek Vats (Eeb Allay Ooo), who will find a way to do it. They may even sell their houses if they have to. They’ll loot a bank if they have to. That’s all a part of the hope,” adds Rajat.