‘I am an entertainer, I have no opinions’: Gulshan Grover

Gulshan Grover sounds chipper on a Monday afternoon. “Do you know there’s an aphrodisiac on your name?” he asks me. Embarrassed, I tell him it’s a common enough Bengali name. He nods but has his own thoughts on the matter. He breaks into an anecdote. “Back in the day, outside Film City, they used to sell ‘shilajit’. They said it’s good for the knees but it was also an aphrodisiac.” We share a laugh as he retreats to praising my name. “It’s quite unique, interesting.”

This is typical Gulshan. The 66-year-old actor never gives offence, never talks ill. It’s a disposition dramatically opposite to the churlish villains he plays. His latest creation, in a goatee and shades, is Gautam Acharya, a moneyman and the antagonist of the Disney+ Hotstar series Cash. The show, set in Mumbai, sees a bunch of kids form a money-laundering gang, after the 2016 Indian banknote demonetisation.

I ask Gulshan if he has memories of demonetisation night. He ducks it forthwith. “Honestly, I don’t have any emotional memory of this particular happening. I was relying completely on how the makers wanted to portray the subject.”

Here, unprompted, he furnishes another anecdote, from the 2006 film Casino Royale where he lost out a Bond villain role to Mads Mikkelsen. “There was a scene where a bullet was stuck in my neck and I had to say something like, ‘I’m feeling no pain.’ There was no memory I could bring to that. I’ve gotten used to building characters from the material itself.”

I marvel a little. Gulshan’s expansive career flashes before my eyes. The actor started out in the 70s but got his break in 1980, with Hum Paanch. Beyond four decades of iconic Bollywood work—playing characters named ‘Chhappan Tikli’, ‘Kesariya Vilayati’, ‘King Don’ and ‘Raja Babusha’—he’s been in British, American, German, Iranian and Malaysian films. His 2019 biography, Bad Man, lists Sooryavanshi as his 500th Bollywood film (only Shakti Kapoor and Aruna Irani seem to figure in that league).

Currently storming the theatres, Sooryavanshi has brought cheer to industry stakeholders. It has also fazed critics, with its slotting of Indian Muslims into ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ camps. Gulshan, who’s played extremists of all stripes, says he trusts matters of representation to his directors. “I’m an entertainer,” he declares. “I have no opinion on a character’s background or what others feel. Similarly, I have no views on various social issues because I’m incapable of it. I’m not qualified enough. My only mission on set is that my director is satisfied and so are my viewers.”