If you’ve grown up in the 90s, you are bound to remember him as the boy from the hit TV serial Just Mohabbat. Kunaal Roy Kapur was also the one with the notorious Delhi belly in 2011’s risqué comedy of the same title. He will be seen in another black comedy releasing this year – Akshat Verma’s Kaalakandi . In between, Roy Kapur has acted in films like Nautanki Sala , Loins of Punjab and directed the mockumentary The President Is Coming . The one common theme that runs through these characters or films is that they are in the comedy genre.
In Kaalakandi , Roy Kapur will be following another path though. “This is different from my previous roles in the sense that he is a very serious guy, I wouldn’t say it’s a comic character at all,” he says. “I play a character called Zubin, who is in love with a girl slightly out of his league. He’s a plain, straight, corporate kind of guy whereas she is flamboyant and attractive and he feels he’s hitting above his weight.” The character’s seriousness was what pulled Roy Kapur to the role. “It’s interesting because in the film I’m not the funny guy.”
So is there a fear of being typecast in comic roles since that’s what people have come to expect from him? “See, I don’t mind being the “funny guy” forever as long as I get to work with good people, good directors and writers,” he reflects. “Ideally I would like people to see me in different roles because I feel that I’m not just a comic actor. But for now I’ll be happy to just be recognised, so being troubled by the image issue is level two,” he shares.
Roy Kapur has recently been a part of the digital content space by playing characters in web series like Tripling or Going Viral . So our conversation veers from character to medium. How has the atmosphere of releasing a film with this kind of subject (black comedy) changed from the time Delhi Belly was released to now? When we already have an AIB and a TVF talking about sexuality or using cuss words in their content? Has the novelty of watching such a film on screen reduced in any way?
“I would say, given the scale of the country, that it is like a small diaspora that exists (which watches digital content), but that is Hindi content and it is accessible to only one half of the country or even less,” asserts Roy Kapur. “But what does connect the youth across the whole country, strangely enough, is English.” So films like Delhi Belly (which was made in English and Hindi) and Kaalakandi (which has a mix of Hindi, Marathi and English) can reach out to a larger audience – unlike the digital content, which is still largely in Hindi.
Earlier there was talk of Kaalakandi releasing in digital space. Considering the times of Netflix and Amazon Prime, would that have been a wiser choice? Roy Kapur disagrees and makes a firm case for why the audience still needs to experience the film in the theatres. “This film would have been great on a digital platform as well – it’s right down that street – it’s got cuss words, sex and violence, but I think that’s what we want (to watch) on big screen as well – we go into the theatre hoping someone is going to push our buttons!” he says. “It’s so difficult to get people to come to the theatres in the first place – either you have a visual spectacle film or you need films which push us in certain directions and I think these are the two which will live on in the future,” he emphasises.
