Violence Works On Screen Because Everyone Wants The Throne: Abhishek Banerjee

What’s common to Danny DeVito, John Lithgow, Steve Carell and Ralph Fiennes? That all of them have excelled the duality of playing comedic characters that are chaotic and hilariously eccentric, and also different manifestations of evil personified. There’s sufficient proof to the theory that buffoons make for the most terrifying monsters, as shown by commedia dell’arte. Cast against type, Henry Fonda played a disturbingly real and unscrupulous outlaw. It might sound like a fairly long leap, but that was exactly how Divyenndu nailed the famous temperamental villainy of Munna Bhaiya in Mirzapur.

But nowhere in contemporary times is the terrifying villainy of the clown underneath more evident than in actor Abhishek Banerjee’s arc. Exactly, a year ago, in the Amazon Prime Video film Stolen, the actor superbly bridged the polarities he’s explored in his career—comedic ones with Stree and the recent Toaster, and brooding villains in Paatal Lok and Apurva (2023)—playing a mild-mannered business guy who gets enlisted, violently and chaotically, for a cause he doesn’t seem to give two hoots about.

After premiering at Venice Film Festival 2023, winning accolades at Beijing International Film Festival, Skip City International D-Cinema Festival in Japan and Zurich Film Festival, Stolen topped charts in Australia, France, Germany, New Zealand, the UK and the US, among other parts of the world. The film was executive-produced by Anurag Kashyap, Kiran Rao, Nikkhil Advani and Vikramaditya Motwane—all renowned names in the Hindi space.

Interestingly, Banerjee, who is part of the cast for Mirzapur the film, cast Divyenndu as the younger son of the crime lord on the show, Kaleen Bhaiya. Having played two memorable psychopaths onscreen, Banerjee is one of Hindi cinema’s most interesting performers right now. On the first anniversary of Stolen, we chatted with him on violence on screen, comedy and horror, and the joys of casting.

Edited excerpts:

It’s a year to Stolen, and after the acclaim and the rave reviews and the festival circuit—what have you learnt about this crucial chapter in your career? Do you still feel the same about its merits?

It’s been very validating. I am satisfied that we were able to make a film on much less than a million-dollar budget. And we delivered an action film in that. That’s the kind of feeling we have been enjoying for the past couple of years. And hopefully we will continue to do so as a team—maybe get our film in theatres.

What do you think has kept Mirzapur ticking, enough to now warrant a movie?

I mean, in Mirzapur, everybody is a bad person, right? It's a film about badasses, a**holes and, funnily, some emotion from those a**holes. That's the best part about Mirzapur, and which is why people connect with it. You're showing, of course, the gangster world, but in that you also see some very true human emotions that in a white-collar society, people are scared to express. The expression of emotion, rage, angst and power is what makes Mirzapur, Mirzapur. Because everyone wants to sit on the throne. It's only about, you know, who has the guts to sit on the throne, no matter what throne it is. So, everybody's running for that seat, for that power. Mirzapur gives them that, that feeling of having achieved power.

You’re also in Legacy, the impressive-looking Netflix series with Madhavan. While crime and violence—purely as genre—have always had a place in viewer imagination, what’s it about the current times that keeps them so relevant? And I ask you this also because you’ve cast for films like Tu Hai Mera Sunday and Brij Mohan Amar Rahe.

For me, as an audience member, when I'm going to watch something on a huge screen, I either need deep emotion so that I'm constantly with the character, or I need some kind of spectacle. And spectacles are very natural to gangster dramas or crime dramas. They have been crowd favourites because they can be so cinematic. We don't really see a lot of crime and violence around us, thankfully, when we are living or going for work and stuff like that. So, people love that story of an underbelly coming to the screen. And whatever people are doing with their weapons and their dialogues. It's a different world altogether.

So I think, and when it exists in our society, so everybody wants to know what is the behind the scene of crime. And basically, a film about crime is nothing but the making of the crime, you know, the whole behind the scene of how the crime happens, what are the guys doing when they're thinking about that. And that's why the whole, whole surge of thrillers on OTT, you see, everybody wants to watch something dark and you know, nasty.

It's because I think people are like hungry for that they want to know more. I think that's a human tendency to know more. So the more you're showing about the very basic life, they're like, yeah, okay, fine.

We understand that until and unless the writer has really dwelled into something. Like, for example, Black with Sanjay Bhansali, I think that's a film about, you know, the human brain, you know, and some stuff like that. And you see the kind of performances and you can also create cinema through you know, the inconsistencies of your brain, but how many people are able to capture that.

So that is why we don't have a Hrishikesh Mukherjee in our times, unfortunately, you know, we're not able to capture the light heartedness of life or you know, the simple life. So everybody's thinking complicated because everybody has to deliver probably something which is a crowd favourite.

You spoke about Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and I keep thinking about how Bollywood comedy when we were growing up, was about Govinda and then Priyadarshan films. Good old family time going to the movies. The big-screen spectacle was about light heartedness. Can comedy be a theatrical experience ever again?

Slapstick comedy has a very tough competition from Instagram influencers.

The kind of comedy that's happening on reels has a lot of real actors doing it. And I often go to their profiles to check who they are, and nine out of ten times, they are theatre actors trying to do these comedy pieces that used to be usual in a David Dhawan film: joke, joke, joke and how the joke becomes a film, a conflict.

And people are laughing. My dad laughs, my driver laughs, I laugh, you laugh. The hunger for laughter is being fulfilled through reels. We really, desperately need a Hera Pheri right now. Now, Hera Pheri is a comedy, but it has so many layers that you're intrigued. And you're laughing with the characters, not on the characters. I think that is the way forward. We need to make films, we can't just make comedy sketches.

TVF has been doing it much better than anybody, for many years. There are so many stand-up comedians who not only are talking as themselves, but as these characters they have, too. It's very difficult to beat all that. Because the audience is getting and the kind of humour you can create online, which also has a lot of abusive language.

And that kind of humour is so potent that something created as family-friendly isn't working, to be honest. Even the performances—the minute actors think they're doing comedy, they will fail. Only someone like Akshay Kumar can pull that off. When Hera Pheri came, it had Akshay sir, Sunil Shetty, Paresh Rawal, Om Puri, Gulshan Grover—all of these serious actors. And Gulshan Grover was not trying to be comic. He was being a serious villain. But we were laughing. Akshay and Sunil Shetty are poor people, miserable, scared, wearing torn clothes. And we laugh at the state they're in. So, it's not about doing comedy, it's about the humour being situational. That kind of a thing will always work.

As much as I’ve loved films like Stree (2018) and Munjya (2024), the whole horror comedy universe that we’ve got going—is it at risk of getting very monotonous very soon? The West is doing horror so well, be it Backrooms and Obsession now or the Together and Weapons double-header very recently. What’s Indian cinema missing in the great evolution of the genre?

You know, it didn't start from Obsession. It started from Get Out. What happens is that horror films are easy to make on a budget. With horror, the ghost is your biggest star. So, it just makes it just easier for an indie filmmaker or a director to conceive those things. But we are still relying a lot on VFX and star power. 

In India, I think we need interest. The bigger directors are not running behind horror; the younger ones are. Maybe people will potentially see a lot of horror films coming out in the coming year. I’m a part of one Bengali horror, one psychological horror with TVF. And the ones that are technically superior will be the ones that’ll win this race. It has to be more human, it has to be more creepy.

The other thing is that horror is a young-audience genre. And the Gen Z are very judgmental and opinionated about filmmaking because they are all filmmakers. They all know how to edit, read and all that. Obsession is a very reel-style-cut film. It doesn’t flow like a conventional film. It's one, two, one, two, one, two. Scene, scene, scene. The same was true of Weapons.

You talked about writing and direction taking the front seat for a bit. So, this person I know kept thinking that you're also the screenwriter Abhishek Banerjee. 

Haha, no, no, no.

And I kept correcting—but then, one does wonder if someone as analytical and astute as you could get into writing and direction any time soon…

I don’t know. Writing and direction both need a lot of hard work. And the kind of hard work that you will do alone. And I am not somebody who can work alone.

I’m a team player and what I'm trying to do is do everything a little, write a little, give some direction ideas, some producing ideas.

How validating has it been to be vindicated for your casting choices? Picking out ingredients for a dish that will earn a rousing standing ovation at the table? Is it a fun job? 

I loved casting. It was so wonderful because you could actually be such a huge part of a film. Most films don’t work because of two things: budget and casting. If you know how to cast and budget your film, it will always be a success. Casting is that important—even when you’re casting up; as in when you’re casting a star, if you don’t get that star, you go to another star. But they might not be the right choice.

Once I gave Mirzapur and when that show became what it became, that was the point where I started retiring myself as a casting director in my head. For me, that was the biggest kick I could get from casting. And after that, I focussed on acting. But it was wonderful just to live my dream through others who were getting cast—be it fighting with producers for Avinash [Tiwary] and Tripti [Dimri], casting Babil in Qala or watching Sudip Sharma vouch for Jaideep [Ahlawat].

Divyenndu in Mirzapur was such an inspired choice…

Divyenndu is always my friend, so I’ll not take that credit. I knew how big an actor he is, and now the world is seeing it.

Five films you would like to recommend to the Esquire reader?

I think Zodiac (2007). And Seven (1995).

Fincher… love it.

Haha, and then, again, Gone Girl (2014). My all-time favourite is, of course, The Shining (1980). And yes, Taxi Driver (1976), man. Taxi Driver.