Bringing a crime journalist’s story to the screen with Despatch, Manoj Bajpayee on his skepticism about doing sex scenes and being convinced by director Kanu Behl
Manoj Bajpayee
Can an actor be surprised by the possibilities of their own craft after a 100-film career? Manoj Bajpayee doubted it. That is, until he worked with director Kanu Behl on Despatch. “After a point, you stop knowing what all is buried in there. You need a passionate and visionary [filmmaker] like Kanu, who can see those aspects in you that you haven’t even thought about,” starts the actor.
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(Left) Manoj Bajpayee in the film
Written by Behl and Ishani Banerjee, Despatch tells the story of a crime journalist who chases a high-stakes story even as his personal life is falling apart. Saying yes to the ZEE5 project came easy to Bajpayee as he trusted that the director, who helmed the acclaimed Titli (2015), would bring a novel approach to the thriller. “I knew Kanu would dwell on something else, even if the format is of a thriller. He’d walk into the dark areas of the character,” says the actor. His faith has paid off now as multiple screenings of the film have begun. “The way Shekhar Kapur and some of my own people—whose opinion I value and who helped me grow as an actor—responded to the film made me happy.”
Kanu Behl
But shooting for the movie was not all about happiness. If there is one aspect that Bajpayee found difficult to reconcile with, it was shooting intimate scenes. ‘Is it necessary?’—that was the actor’s first reaction when he learnt about their presence in the storytelling. “At the initial stage, I told him, ‘I just want to know. Is it necessary?’ I wanted to know his [thought process] behind it. He came up with his answer, and I was quite okay with it. [That said], how I was going to be [while shooting it] was the question. By nature, I am a very shy person. I was struggling to do the scenes for the camera. But that wasn’t evident to my director or to anyone else.”
Bajpayee praises his co-star Shahana Goswami on this count. He recalls being in awe of her approach to the scenes. “I wanted to be like her because she wasn’t only doing that scene or playing it sexy, but also depicting the mental state of the character. That was quite fascinating to me about her as an actor,” he says.
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