The upcoming JioHotstar show Hunkkaar is filled to the brim with talented actors. From Fatima Sana Shaikh and Aneet Padda to Mohammed Zeeshan Ayub and Ram Kapoor , it is a stacked cast. But as the trailer dropped, the one person who grabbed eyeballs was Raghubir Yadav . The veteran actor, known for playing mild-mannered, likeable good guys, has been cast against type as the villain, the self-proclaimed godman accused of sexual assault. The show’s creators, Karan D Kapadia and Nitya Mehra, talk to Hindustan Times about his casting, the idea of the show, and more.
HT: I want to come to the character of Baapji in the show. You cast Raghubir Yadav, the man who has made a name playing the good-natured uncle for years.
He is the sweetest kalakar you will ever meet, a true artist. For filmmakers and actors, to take a person nobody has seen in that avatar is great, and to get a guy like him to agree to play a role he has never touched is challenge upon challenge—re-envisioning him, making him sinister yet not playing a villain just for the sake of playing a villain. Because very often directors draw from the person they cast, but in this case, he is diametrically opposite, nitya Mehra: I cannot explain to you how difficult those scenes are,.
So that naturally goes into when we write characters; it’s a lived experience, actually. Karan D Kapadia: The tropes are inevitable. It’s how you mask them to make them unique. We put the lens and ask the wrong question if we say, “Oh, now it’s a woman cop, so what are the tropes that go with it vis-à-vis patriarchy, vis-à-vis not getting your say, vis-à-vis all these ideas? For us, it was very important for our character to have a razor-sharp focus on the investigation, on bringing the facts to light, on believing the victim’s narrative, on being the emotional backbone of that family, and on protecting that family against the world at large. I think we’ve been able to stay away largely from conventional tropes of what a female officer goes through, without approaching it as “Oh, she’s a female cop in authority, so what are her challenges? I feel like, can one day I just be called just a director? The reason it’s become a trope is that we’ve made such a big deal around the idea.
What you said is very important: she’s not necessarily a “woman cop”, she’s a cop. Nitya Mehra: I think for the longest time I was dealing with labels like “Nitya is a good female director”.
