Pratik Gandhi on a Bull Run

The actor has become a huge star overnight, after the success of his web series The Scam. His journey was anything but simple

Having done his schooling in Surat, Pratik went on to get an engineering degree. After his house was destroyed by floods, he decided to pursue his passion for acting. He moved to Mumbai and found that the path to the screen does not run smooth.

But the life of the man who once did odd jobs to survive – from helping to install TV towers to anchoring – has taken yet another turn. “It has changed dramatically,” says Pratik. “People are looking at me rather differently now. When I go to public places, people ask me to repeat dialogues. Children ask me to repeat lines from The Scam.”

Recounting a recent incident, the actor says, “I had gone to Prithvi Theatre to perform in my play Sir Sir Sarla. There was a huge crowd waiting for me after the show, wanting to click pictures with me. People were making me repeat dialogues from my show, refusing to let me go till I obliged. This doesn’t normally happen at Prithvi, where a lot of actors are always present.”

Professionally too, Pratik is on a high. “I have signed four films and two web series. I have finished shooting one film and will do the rest this year. I have around 10 to 12 more scripts to read. It is surreal,” he says.

Tell him that nine out of ten actors we speak to look at him as an icon and a benchmark, and he blushes. “It is unbelievable. While it feels great to be looked up to, the truth is that anyone who is a good actor who gets an opportunity can make it big today,” he says. Elaborating on the change in the way people see acting now, Pratik says, “It’s not about heroes. It is about characters. People are picking out good characters and actors who can play those characters. Look at the kind of work that someone like Pankaj Tripathi is doing. It is phenomenal. A sixty-year-old man is also a lead character now in a web show, and that is the beauty of the OTT medium.”

The actor got his big-ticket entry with the film Bey Yaar in 2014. He took a 22 day-break from his full-time job to work in the film, which became the biggest Gujarati blockbuster of that period. This was followed by another Gujarati film, Wrong Side Raju. “I took the decision to quit my job a month before the release of Wrong Side Raju. My family was not upset. I had a loan and an EMI for a house to pay. But they were actually waiting for me to decide to become a full-time actor. They were happy that I took the call,” he reveals.

Wrong Side Raju went on to win the National Award for the Best Gujarati Film. Talking of The Scam, he says it was like doing six movies. “It is nine hours long and the kind of exposure that I got through it is huge,” he says. Pratik also notes that people who have known him for a long time tell him that the recognition was overdue. “They feel that I had the passion for acting and I have managed to pursue it with all honesty,” he says.

Being a part of the Mumbai Gujarati culture, one might expect Pratik to have adequate knowledge of the stock market, which would have helped him in his portrayal of the infamous Harshad Mehta in The Scam. But the actor dismisses this theory. “Honestly, I am not a Gujarati in that sense because I know nothing about the stock market,” he says. “We were told to stay away from it early in our lives.”

It was always the theatre that drew Pratik. He went on the stage for the first time as a student of Standard IV, when he took part in a five-minute skit. The audience appreciation still resounds in his ears.

For those to tuned in late, Pratik was the negative character in the Salman Khan Production Love Yatri starring Salman’s brother-in-law Aayush Sharma, and also acted in Mitron directed by Nitin Kakkar. He is now looking forward to the release of his Hindi films Raavan Leela and Bhavai.

“It’s not about heroes. It is about characters. People are picking out good characters and actors who can play those characters.”

The life of the man who once did odd jobs to survive – from helping to install TV towers to anchoring – has taken yet another turn. “It has changed dramatically. When I go to public places, people ask me to repeat dialogues. Children ask me to repeat lines from The Scam,” Pratik says.