Reeta Sanyal starring Adah Sharma, Ankur Rathee, and Manik Papneja is currently streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. Every day an episode of the show was premiered on the OTT platform, and now, all the 20 episodes are there to binge-watch if you have not watched the series yet.
Reeta Sanyal has received a great response from the audiences, and recently, Filmibeat interacted with Ankur Rathee, and spoke to him about the show, his cop role, co-star Adah Sharma, and more…
What response have you received for Reeta Sanyal?
It’s been great. I think people are seeing me in this new avatar for the first time as a police inspector. They’ve seen me be flirtatious before they’ve seen me be jovial and in comedic roles before but Jai Vardhan, my character has a very unique flavor of all three of these, he flirts and jokes around in in a very different manner from all my other characters it. I have usually played characters who are from the upper social economic class but Jai Vardhan is as desi as they come. He is from the heartland and Hindi is his primary language with a dash of Haryanvi. This character has been quite different from most of my other roles by that count and I think audiences have also been quite excited to see me in this avatar.
How was your experience of working with Adah?
Adah is phenomenal. When you have an actor who has been working in the industry for a very long time, but only recently gets their due, which Adah definitely did with The Kerala Story, the kind of popularity that film garnered and what it garnered for her career is phenomenal. In those instances, when someone finds such success, it can go two ways- that person can become full of themselves in many ways and think they’re better than others or it could make a person very grateful, very grounded even more. For Adah, thankfully, it was it was the latter, she leads with gratitude. She leads with a spirit of collaboration. She sees her co-actors as equals and when you work with someone like that it’s a lot of fun because you both are not serving yourselves, you’re not trying to make the scene about you, rather you both are working together to serve the scene, the story and the director. That was a fantastic working equation with Adah, not to mention she is so silly, so wacky and so am I. We did a lot of Masti on set.
You play a cop so did you take any reference from actors like Salman Khan, Ajay Devgn, or someone else to portray the character?
Oh, this is a very interesting question. I asked our producer when he first offered me the role, I said, ‘why did you approach me for this character? Because at the face of it, it’s an odd choice’. And he said, ‘it’s precisely because it’s an odd choice that I’ve chosen you’. He said that we’ve already seen Ajay Devgan, Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar, wearing the Vardee on screen and seeing their versions of what a cinematic police inspector looks like, everyone expects to see that. He said, ‘Because you come from a different background and you bring a very different flavour to your characters, it would be very unique and surprising for viewers to see a police inspector in the garb of Ankur Rathee’, and that was a very enticing response that he gave me that actually sealed the deal for me. It’s what convinced me to do the role. So, did I take inspiration from some of these other actors? I don’t think so. I didn’t watch any of their performances prior to doing this show or in preparation for doing this show. I think my approach to it was purely what came out organically from within.
Do you think comedy is the most difficult genre?
Again, another interesting question. I think within comedy there are so many different sub-genres, there’s slapstick and over the top kind of comedy, very physical sort of comedy and I think I’m very good at physical comedy. I think that there’s a different type of comedy that is a little bit drier, more like British humor that you might consider. I think that to me is a little bit more challenging personally. But is it a difficult genre generally? I don’t think so. I think it depends actor to actor. Definitely the comedy in Reeta Sanyal fit me like a glove. It was fun. I don’t know if I did it complete justice, but I definitely enjoyed it while in the process. I don’t know if audiences found it funny, but I found it funny and I had a good time with it.
Tell us something about your upcoming projects.
I’ve got a few different projects in the works, unfortunately none of them I can give many details about, but there is a film that right now is something I’m working on.
Before Reeta Sanyal, Ankur has grabbed our attention with his performances in OTT series like Four More Shots Please, Undekhi, and others.
