POWER PLAY
Bollywood actors Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui face off in the gritty ‘Sacred Games’, Netflix’s first Indian series, streaming from tomorrow
Feeling liberated was a common sentiment experienced by the principal cast of
Sacred Games, Netflix’s first Indian TV series premiering tomorrow.
Directed by Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane, the eight-part series boasts a cast that rivals a big-budget Bollywood musical. Actors Saif Ali Khan, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte are in charge of bringing alive the gangland thriller written by celebrated author Vikram Chandra. “The medium [digital] was so liberating. As a director, you want to be able to tell stories that don’t have to be told in two-anda-half hours with an interval and three songs inserted into it. So many of these boundaries weren’t there … To create something where characters have conflicts going on for years was a lot of fun,” said Motwane.
Sacred Games delves into the rise and fall of Mumbai mobster Ganesh Gaitonde (Siddiqui) and his sly power games with an unassuming Sikh police officer Sartaj Singh (Khan). While Kashyap, who is known for his violent and putrid films such as Gangs Of Wasseypur, was in charge of culling out the best from Siddiqi’s morally corrupt character, Motwane worked on Sartaj’s emotionally complex character.
But what bound them together was their implicit trust in each other and the material in their hands. However, complete freedom also came with self-imposed censorship.
“Just because there is no censorship, we didn’t tell each other to let go and have a party. Self censorship has always been there. Even when we are shooting sex scenes, it is not pornography or while shooting violent scenes, it wasn’t a different sort of pornography,” said Kashyap.
Before you gear up to binge-watch Sacred
Games, set in the mean streets of Mumbai, here’s our interview with the stars of the series…