Manoj Bajpayee is one of the most talented actors we have today. Starting with a small role in Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, he did not take much time to prove his finesse and won the national award for his 1998 Satya.
The actor has played a variety of characters in his career that spanned over a decade. With his level of talent, no character should really bother him. But there is one character which did not challenge him but disturbed him extremely. And that is the character of Faizal in Love Sonia.
While speaking to Rajeev Masand in a recent interview, Manoj revealed that he always thought he would never play a guy who is very cruel or sexual towards women. But he did play such a character in Love Sonia and that extremely disturbed him.
“I hated myself while doing it. That character blew me off and extremely disturbed me,” he said.
He rejected the role three times and even got one scene eliminated from the script thinking the makers won’t come to him.
The Pinjar actor said, “The moment they came to me I said No. The producer and director came to me thrice.. I said No. When Mukesh Chhbara asked me to do it and told me they can’t think of anybody else then I sat with the makers on all the scenes. I insisted on taking out one scene which I felt was there to just make it sensational. They revisit their script and took out that scene. They thanked me for it. Still I did not want to do it.”
The actor finally came to terms with the character when he got into the psyche of it and understood his intention behind his action.
“He (the character) is not looking at women as sexual object. He is looking at them as his business product. When the intention of the guy occurred to me I said yes but few of the sequences still disturbed me,” he said.
Manoj Bajpayee was last seen in Sonchiriya and The Family Man and will next be seen in American action thriller Dhaka.