B-SCHOOL TO BOLLYWOOD

VINAY PATHAK ENJOYS BOTH MOVIES AND THE STAGE, THOUGH THEATRE WAS HIS FIRST LOVE

FFrom growing up in Bihar to working as a theatre usher in New York so that he could watch plays for free, Vinay Pathak has made his way to becoming one of Bollywood’s most versatile actors, with a slew of new films in the works.

“Chali China is yet to be shot so I can’t divulge much about it,” says Pathak, whose Khajoor Pe Atke hit cinemas last month. “Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai and Tashkent Files are thrillers. The former is a political satire, and the latter an investigative political thriller.”

For the long-time character actor, the role of the younger brother in a small town family in Khajoor Pe Atke was familiar territory. His next two projects will see him playing a spy and a soldier, he says.

“A well-written script is the first and the foremost requirement” when he’s choosing movie roles. When it comes to theatre, he prefers to experiment, as “there’s a huge learning graph from the first reading/ rehearsal point of view,” says Pathak, who has won accolades for his work on stage. He enjoys both movies and the stage, though theatre was his first love. He was a business management student at Stony Brook University when he enrolled for an entry-level theatre course “as soul food for the overcrowded mind”. The first play he ever saw, a local production of Equus by Peter Shaeffer, enchanted him. “I could not sleep that night…. I went and saw it the next four evenings. Since I was a student, I requested to be an usher to watch the play for free. The following week I decided to quit business school and apply for drama school,” he recalls.

Content to remain a struggling New York actor forever, he only came to Mumbai for the first time in 1995, heeding a teacher’s advice that any acting job is a good acting job. His struggle was by no means over, but his fate was sealed. And nobody could be happier about it than his Indian audience.n