Kunal Kapoor on 'The Empire': Babur in the show may be different from how he was

Amid social media backlash against The Empire, Kunal Kapoor says he merely remained truthful to the way the Mughal emperor was portrayed in the source material

Kunal Kapoor remembers reading Alex Rutherford’s Raiders from the North, the first book in the Empire of the Moghul series. Call it serendipity or what you will, but a few months later, the actor received a call from Nikkhil Advani, who offered him the role of Babur in The Empire. “Nikkhil said he has the book rights and wanted me to read the script. Sometimes, scripts are not able to live up to the source material, but here, the script enhances it,” says Kapoor, who fronts the Disney+ Hotstar period piece that dropped over the weekend.  

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Telling the story of Mughals in the current social climate is not easy. As soon as the Mitakshara Kumar-directed series dropped online, a section of social media users expressed their anger against it for “glorifying the Mughals.” Kapoor says he tried to be honest to Babur, a man of many contradictions. “Babur in the show is probably different from how Babur was [in real life]. We were being honest to the way the character was written in the book. In the book, he was a physically strong man who was emotionally vulnerable, even weak sometimes. He is the emperor, but is crippled with self-doubt. He is constantly asking himself if he is good enough for the throne. I found these nuances fascinating. I saw in him a man torn between the voice of his father — a softer, poetic man [Umar Sheikh Mirza II] — and his ambitious grandmother [Aisan Daulat Begum]. In historical dramas, there is a tendency to make it theatrical. I wanted him to come across as relatable.”

Many had thought that things would look up for the actor post Veeram (2017), the acclaimed Malayalam rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Does he feel that he didn’t get his due? “The moment you say you didn’t get your [due], or you should’ve got more, it will make you a bitter person. I don’t want to project myself as a victim of the industry. I live in the present. I am being offered exciting work and I would rather focus on that.”

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