Abhishek Chaubey’s web series Killer Soup is winning hearts currently. The dark comedy, which stars Manoj Bajpayee and Konkona Sen Sharma, debuted on Netflix last week, and won acclaim from critics and praise from fans. Prior to the show’s release, the filmmaker spoke to DNA about the series, going ‘pan-India’, and why internalised acting does not impress him.
Killer Soup stars actors from the Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam film industries, and features dialogue in both Hindi and Tamil. It is set in a town in Tamil Nadu as well. When asked if this was his attempt at going pan-India with a web series, Abhishek says, “I was aware of the fact that this pan-India thing is happening across theatrical cinema. But I was not affected by it. But I had another reason (to include Tamil lines). I have always had a problem with, say, if a film is set in Germany with Nazi officers speaking English in German accents. I just can’t take that. Yes, it limits the audience to an extent because a lot of people can’t read subtitles. But I have always thought that if I am setting my story in a region, be it Tamil Nadu or Assam, I can’t imagine people from there speak Hindi so that my audience can understand.”
The series focuses on Swathi (Konkona), who tries to replace her husband with her lover (both played by Manoj Bajpayee). The show is a dark comedy but the stakes are all too real for the characters. Abhishek explains the choice of genre: “There was another way of writing this story, where the audience is not ahead of the characters. But that perhaps would have been the conventional approach. But Alfred Hitchcock famously said, ‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it’. I think that when the audience is one up on the characters, they tend to have a lot of fun. The humour is coming out from the way the characters are, not from the situation. It’s more just the way these people are, so atrangi (colourful).”
The series relies on the actors going over, and doing a bit extra in front of the camera, which goes against the prevailing trend of internalised acting where performers are restrained. Abhishek says he isn’t a big fan of the trend. “In our mainstream cinema, we are seeing a lot of internalised acting these days. That is actually terrible. It’s so one note. In order to reduce the emotion, they are not doing anything at all. In Killer Soup, at least, I get to watch all these actors in a state where they are not trying to do that. Here, they are hyper all the time. That is also great acting. Jim Carey is a great actor. You need to explore that kind of a thing too,” he says.
