Pankaj Tripathi Says Reading Poetry Helped Him Portray Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee Without Mimicry
variety.comNaman Ramachandran Noted actor Pankaj Tripathi faced one of the toughest challenges of his career when he was asked to portray former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in biopic “Main Atal Hoon.” Vajpayee (1924-2018) was a poet and a politician who served three terms as Prime Minister.
He belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party, which is currently in power in India. Vajpayee, who presided over India’s nuclear tests, was also known as a diplomat who improved relations with the country’s arch rival Pakistan and introduced multiple reforms.
He was popular across party lines. “I’m not good at mimicry,” Tripathi told Variety. The conflict that the actor was how much of Vajpayee to mimic and how much to internalize his performance. “How much of his mannerisms should I keep and how much not,” Tripathi said.
Tripathi read several books about Vajpayee and watched news clips and speeches. In the end he decided to adopt the late politician’s body language and mannerisms for all his public facing scenes, especially the speeches, and deliver an internalized performance for the private sequences for which no video footage exists.
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