How Hathoda haunted us, 100 per cent!

Abhishek Banerjee as Hathoda Tyagi in the web-series Paatal Lok

Journalists are often accused of monetising access. As in, eventually switching over to careers they favourably cover - politics, entertainment, etc. It may be disservice to their core job. While legal, is it ethical?

Actor Abhishek Banerjee, casting director for the brilliant web-series, Paatal Lok (2020; Prime Video) - who, technically, cast himself as its main villain, serial killer with a hammer, ‘Hathoda' Tyagi - evidently went through a similar kinda tongue-wagging about it.

"It was an accusation then, it's a debate now. And I see where it's coming from, having been on the other side [as an aspiring actor] myself," Banerjee, 40, tells me.

As per him, generally, "success has two meanings: lineage, or corruption. It's difficult for people to accept any other way."

To be fair to Banerjee, the role he was eyeing in Paatal Lok is actually the hero Hathiram Choudhary's (Jaydeep Ahlawat) buddy-cop, Imran Ansari, played by the securely quiet, Ishwak Singh.

Paatal Lok's creator Sudeep Sharma told Banerjee, "Your eyes lack the innocence [for the part]."

It's when Sharma was watching Banerjee as the altogether oppositely framed, goofy, Jana, in Stree, in the theatre, that he texted him to test for the insanely dark, Hathoda Tyagi, instead.

"I don't know what Sudeep saw," Banerjee recalls, but he "cracked the audition". Which is something Banerjee was clearly not good at - ever since he moved to Mumbai to pursue acting in films, but setting up a casting company, in order to carry on as a working Bollywood professional for eight years, still.

No major role came his way.

His firm, Casting Bay, was among the first to concentrate on fresh recruits for web-series, around 2016, a new medium - "widening the talent pool for [untested] actors, since [mainstream] cinema had space for none."

On his part, Banerjee would show up in sketches/shows for the YouTube collective, TVF. That's where the more exciting work on scripts/ideas were going on, anyway.

As against offstream, commercial Bollywood, that got stuck in a rut, post the new wave, with edgier content - featuring filmmakers like Ram Gopal Varma, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, Vishal Bharadwaj, et al - exploded into the scene, back in the late '90s, early 2000s.

Those directors' works had drawn Banerjee to Mumbai. "Their coteries were full, though," he says. The newer voices were only emerging online.

Banerjee is an ex-player. As in, he belongs to Players, the theatre society of Delhi University's Kirori Mal College (KMC), mentored for almost "five decades", by its English literature professor, one, Keval Arora.

It's hardly acknowledged locally in Bollywood that the relatively little-known KMC could be the IIT/IIM for mainstream actors.

Consider its alumni, as Banerjee lists it, "from Amitabh Bachchan, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Shakti Kapoor, Satish Kaushik, to directors Kabir Khan, Ali Abbas Zafar, Victor (Vijay Krishna Acharya), (writer) Himanshu Sharma, (lyricist) Raj Shekhar, to contemporary actors, Sushant Singh, Mohd Zeeshan Ayub, Divyendu Sharma…"

I add late Manoj Kumar to the roster! One such, Ashish Khare, Players/KMC alumnus, was the casting agent for Stree that brought Banerjee instant fame, through his character, Jana, given multiple offshoots in the ‘Maddock Horror-Comedy Universe' (with Bhediya, Munjya, Stree for franchises).

Although it's for Hathoda Tyagi that Banerjee is likely to be most remembered.

For one, while Hindi cinema has had a prominent pantheon of pure-evil villains, forever, Hathoda could be the first, proper, Hindi OTT villain, with a short yet strong omnipresence.

Also, so viscerally menacing, that he could be the nightmare many may actually stay away from the show for.

As it is, Paatal Lok premiered during the pandemic. When Banerjee read its script, he didn't know what to do with a "role that had no dialogues." He thought of bulking up. But that'd be too obvious.

For inspiration, Banerjee looked at Kevin Spacey's similarly cold part (John Doe) in David Fincher's Se7en (1995). And the equally chilling, Cameron Britton (‘Co-Ed Killer'), from Joe Penhall's Netflix series, Mindhunter (2017; also produced by Fincher).

To get to Hathoda, though, Banerjee says "he had to make a deeper connection with [the actual] Vishal Tyagi. How do you generate empathy for such a socially excluded person? Let him smile for a dog in jail, establishing he could still be more earthy than many."

That's an iconic scene from Paatal Lok. My favourite is his killer school backstory.

The toughest for Banerjee was the scene between Hathoda submitting before his Guruji: "I'm far from that person; I had to imagine being vulnerable before my mother. Returning from shoot, I was crying at the moment of epiphany, with my wife (Tina Noronha) in the car."

This marriage, apparently, "went down south", briefly, once Banerjee developed anger-management issues, after playing the child-rapist, Dhavle, in Devashish Makhija's Ajji (2017).

The couple left the city, together, for a month, to get some respite. To cover up for expenses upon return, Banerjee picked up the minor but effective role of the razor-wielding, emotionally-numb ‘Compounder' (Subodh) in Mirzapur (2018).

You can, hence, sense his natural trajectory leading up to Hathoda. Only, this time, he was sure to master the craft of detaching self from role.

It helped that almost at the beginning of Paatal Lok's shoot, they first shot the ending scene of Hathoda's death.

Having got a handle on Hathoda, Banerjee says he first killed him in his head, before playing him on the screen.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.