With ZEE5’s recently released crime-drama, Bhagwat Chapter 1: Raakshas, actor Jitendra Kumar breaks bad. Popularly known for playing lighter characters, like that of a sincere secretary of a village council in the hinterland comedy-drama, Panchayat and a friendly physics teacher in Kota Factory, Jitendra turns into a shrewd, manipulative serial killer in Bhagwat. Interestingly, his character introduces himself as a chemistry teacher, which itself feels like a cheeky reference to Jeetu Bhaiya from Kota Factory. The actor, however, doesn’t feel so, saying that Bhagwat is based on a real person, who was a teacher too. “There is no silent nod or layering here,” Jitendra smiles. “It was not designed to be a reference or anything.”
The actor also says that he wasn’t intentionally looking to break his image with Bhagwat. For him, all the characters he has played before come with their own complexities. “I want to play all kinds of characters and feature in films across all genres. I am not consciously looking to break my image or anything. Ultimately, the story has to excite me and everything else falls in place,” he says. That’s what happened with Bhagwat when his friend, Sumit Saxena, who has written the dialogues for the film, narrated the story. The actor took some time to give his nod to the opportunity as he felt that portraying the character could be challenging. “I had never played characters with negative shades before, and there were many layers to the story. So, I read the script twice and thought it over before saying yes,” says Jitendra.
The film features him as a sweet, charming young man in the first half as he traps a woman into loving him. It is only in the second half that he lets his menacing, far more sinister side out. That’s when the film becomes a clash of two minds as Arshad Warsi’s no-nonsense cop interrogates him. For Jitendra, getting the pitch right in portraying the villainous shades of the character was especially difficult. “It was a bit tricky in the initial 7-8 days of shoot, but gradually, I started to understand the nuances more with the discussions I had with the director,” he says. “I had to keep the pitch controlled to show him as a common man who can be anywhere among us. That’s how psycho killers are. No one can gauge their manipulative tendencies.”
It is not just in Bhagwat where Jitendra brings a certain restraint to his on-screen persona. All of the actor’s performances have an almost effortless quality, where they seem more like an extension of his own personality, and the craft doesn’t overpower his display of emotions. Whether it is the irritation that he inhabits in some moments of Panchayat or the earnest, everydayness of the likeable teacher in Kota Factory, the actor says his lines without an added layer of dramatics. The restraint becomes apparent even in a pivotal moment in Bhagwat, where his character compares his menace to that of a hawk—a scene that is not exactly subtle on paper.
“I always focus on keeping the emotions real even if it is a loud scene where there is some dialoguebaazi,” he says. For the actor, it is very intentional to find realism in his characters. “Even during script readings, I keep hoping directors have that sensibility so that we can present emotions in a nuanced manner. It is a challenge when you are not on the same page with the director. That’s when you need to put in effort,” says Jitendra.
The presence of a certain practicality in his performance might also stem from his background in engineering, which could have lent a realistic ease to his approach. Perhaps years of studying equations and formulas subconsciously trained his mind to break down his acting process and present it in a simple, grounded manner. Jitendra, however, refutes the hypothesis. “Engineering has nothing to do with my acting. IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) only introduced me to drama and theatre. That’s where I developed a liking towards the craft. But there is no connection to what I studied there with creativity,” Jitendra explains, adding that it is difficult for him to decode his acting process. “I mostly just go with the flow and focus on what the director has envisioned. After that, I just try to be as convincing as possible on the day of shoot,” he says and concludes, “After all, it’s like any other job — something you want to do and forget about when you come back home.”
