Actor Ali Fazal opened up about his relationship with violence, and the differences that he sometimes has with the filmmakers behind his hit Prime Video series Mirzapur. He said that he become okay with watching violence on screen only recently, but still finds it hard to wrap his head around some of the things he is required to do as a part of Mirzapur. In an interview with Sucharita Tyagi, he was asked if he has ever had moral dilemmas about his work, and he said, “Mirzapur is half of that. It’s violent, and I’m not violent. My insides don’t accept that.”
Asked how he navigates this situation, he said, “There’s no other way, and this is the most cliched line, but you get into it. It takes extreme focus. In front of the camera, it’s meditation. For me, there are two times in my life that are meditative. When we’re sitting in a hall and watching a film, or when we’re shooting. The noise around the shoot, before and after, that’s noisy to me. I crave when the camera rolls.”
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Ali said that it took him a while to be able to watch the blockbuster show, which recently unveiled its third season, but he has becoming less repulsed by violence in general. “It’s also because of the news you’re watching. I better be able to handle that violence, because there are real people out there who are going through s**t. Our films are obviously going to reflect a part of that,” he said.
Asked if he puts his foot down when things get out of hand, he said, “Yes. Now, by way of my privilege, I suppose, it has increased. But I’ve always been a bit… And that’s probably why I’ve lost out on a lot of work. But those moral dilemmas happen. On Mirzapur, there was a scene where I kill someone in what I thought at the time was a very unnecessary way to execute that scene. And I just couldn’t redeem myself. The character also could not have redeemed itself from that. I thought it was just wrong, like why would you write that?”
He continued, “I had to constantly battle my head and the character’s, and not judge that. And at the same time, I’m asking the filmmaker, ‘Why?’ But then there are so many whys. You sit down with the writers, the directors, and that could turn into an ugly…”
Mirzapur is regarded as one of India’s most successful streaming shows, and has featured actors such as Pankaj Tripathi, Divyendu Sharma, and Vikrant Massey. A theatrical spin-off film was recently announced.
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