Tanuj Virwani on working with Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha in Sidharth Malhotra-led Yodha
Tanuj Virwani
It took Tanuj Virwani more than a decade to realise his wish of being a Dharma actor, but he is pleased that when the inevitable happened, it was for a good role. The actor plays a pivotal role in Yodha, a hijack thriller led by Sidharth Malhotra. Virwani says the world created by director duo Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha was drastically different from his web shows. “Since I’ve largely been doing web work, I got used to a certain style of working. There, [we’d] shoot six to seven pages of dialogue a day. On the set of Yodha, right from the rehearsals to blocking the scenes, nothing was rushed.”
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Virwani believes the director duo have earned their stripes, having been assistant directors on Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan (2023) and several big projects. Their years of experience had sufficiently prepared them for their maiden directorial venture. “Karan [Johar, producer] is not going to hand over the reins of a new potential franchise to a couple of newcomers, if he doesn’t believe in them. [They seemed like] seasoned players. When you rise through the ranks by assisting on prime projects, you learn so much on the job. They [didn’t] step on each other’s toes. At no point did I get contradictory feedback from either; they were always on the same page. Also, if one was directing me in a scene, the other would not be on set.”
With the thriller largely set inside an aircraft, the actor says most of his scenes involved shooting against a green screen. “You have to use your imagination in such cases. But the directors gave live audio commentary on set. I was reacting to whatever they were throwing at me.”
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