Manoj Bajpayee, who will soon be seen in Dipesh Jain’s psychological thriller Gali Guleiyan, reveals that he came dangerously close to suffering a breakdown during the making of the film in which he plays a man who loses his grip over reality. “We were shut in the claustrophobic gullies of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi, and I was playing a man troubled to the point of not being able to tell the difference between make-believe and reality. On our 20th day on location, I asked Dipesh to shut down the shoot because the role was affecting me more deeply than I expected.”
Luckily for the film, the director seemed to know how to deal with the problem and get the best out of the actor. “Dipesh would shoot a traumatic sequence and then lock me up in a room where I had no choice but to sleep. I’d come out refreshed and do another scene and be knocked out, psychologically, again. It went on like this until the end of the shoot. I had a tough time drawing a line between my character and me. I didn’t know where one ended and the other began.”
He reveals that one of the first things he did after completing the film, was to get rid of all physical characteristics he associated with his character. But, he found that leaving behind his character was not as easy as changing his hairstyle and his clothes. “Somewhere, the traumatised, disoriented, misfits that I have played, have stayed with me. When people meet me after a gap of some years, they say that I look older than I should. That’s because I carry all these existentially burdened characters within me,” he says.
