Pankaj Tripathi has returned to the screens with his new film Kadak Singh. The thriller from Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury stars Pankaj along with Sanjana Sanghi and merges a whodunit with some classic family drama. Just ahead of the release of the film, Pankaj spoke with DNA about Kadak Singh, the changed OTT landscape, and his stardom.
Kadak Singh deals with the turbulent relationship between a father and a daughter, played by Pankaj and Sanjana. Incidentally, a week before its release, Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal hit the screens and that film focussed on a turbulent father-son relationship. Talking about this unique diversity in Indian cinema right now, Pankaj says, “It didn’t exist earlier. After the arrival of OTT, the scope of cinema has become larger. It was impossible to do all this earlier. Kadak Singh talks about the same relationship but in such a different manner, almost north south pole. Audience exists for both.”
The National Award winner says that the landscape of cinema has changed because of the emergence of OTT and push for a different kind of content.”This is the time when we can do a film like Kadak Singh. Ten years ago, it wasn’t possible. OMG 2 was not possible 10 years ago. You couldn’t think about discussing sex and sex education in a film. People would say ‘ye kya hai’. But we are doing it now. So the time has changed,” he says.
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Another thing that has changed is that the ‘character artistes’ are also finding stardom these days. Pankaj is among a new generation of actors who are applauded for their craft and still have mainstream fame despite not being the conventional hero. He says, “I had never thought there would be memes on me. Of course there was no concept of memes back then but I had never thought people would mimic me in my lifetime. Now there are 5-6 people doing it. I have met a few of them. I tell them it’s good because I came to Mumbai to earn money and now you are earning money by copying me.”
Kadak Singh, his latest release, is currently streaming on Zee5.
