The day I think of myself as a ‘star’, I get separated from people: Nawazuddin Siddiqui on his Emmy Awards 2021 nomination
The Hindu
Nominated for Best Actor at the Emmy Awards 2021 for ‘Serious Men’, actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui discusses what keeps him motivated and why he finds the process of finding a character rewarding, even if it comes at a personal cost
When Nawazuddin Siddiqui breathed life into the now-eponymous Faizal Khan in Anurag Kashyap’s gory-masterpiece, Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), it not only set the benchmark for what constituted ‘good acting’ but was also widely regarded as the performance of the decade that put him on the map, literally.
Faizal Khan, for Nawaz, must have been a poisoned chalice. For, a stream of similar such villainous characters, expected to smoke ganja and massacre people, followed and soon he would suffer from the onslaught of the Nawazuddin Siddiqui problem — of being typecast in a role that can only be described as something conceived and written for him.
But the question that remained on everyone’s lips; everyone who exited the cinema hall after Gangs of Wasseypur was, can Nawaz ever top this? The answer, as it turned out, was a resounding yes. It happened the second time, once again with Anurag Kashyap in 2016, when Raman Raghav 2.0 released, in which Nawazuddin explored the trickery corners of a psychopathic killer’s mind. This is not an extrapolation; he outdid himself for the third time in Sacred Games (2018), the fourth in Manto (2019), and has since been beating himself in what appears to be a one-man marathon.