Ali Fazal : An Actor and A Gentleman

WHAT ARE THE odds that a boy from Doon School and St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, educated in the niceties of being a modern young man, ends up as the prototype for a Purvanchali strongman, with muscles to match his machismo, in three seasons of Mirzapur on Prime Video? Nothing from Ali Fazal’s background indicated that he would be anything but his early career choices: a doctor or a United Nations diplomat.

But a busted shoulder while playing basketball in school put paid to that when it shifted young Ali’s focus to theatre, acting in school productions of plays such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana. That kind of genre-crossing served him well when he joined the Hindi film industry. If there was a starring role in the Beverly Hills 90210 inspired Always Kabhi Kabhi (2011) with basketball matches and high school crushes, equally there was a powerful cameo in 3 Idiots (2009) where he played a student who cannot take the pressure of the engineering institute and dies by suicide. “It was in my third year of college,” he says, and “it finally allowed me to have the chat with my father about not wanting his money anymore,” says Fazal.

Fazal’s career has seen seamless switches between ethnically ambiguous speaking parts in big Hollywood movies from an Arab prince in Furious 7 (2015) to the suave Andrew Katchadourian in Death on the Nile (2022) to a variety of parts in well received but underwhelming commercial movies such as Bobby Jasoos (2014) and Milan Talkies (2019).

But it is as Guddu Pandit, the some­what unhinged, power-obsessed don in training in Mirzapur, that he has acquired cult status. With good reason. Beginning as the naive bodybuilder brother who decides to take revenge when the don’s son wipes out most of his family, Fazal has been able to build the arc of an increasingly manic man engaged in a blood feud.

In the latest season, though, he hopes he has been able to bring about the transformation of the strongman into one who begins to use his brain. And understands the futility of violence. In a teary scene towards the end of season three, his father asks his forgiveness for instructing him how to fight, not how to love. The son recipro­cates by breaking down.

Karan Anshuman, who directed season one, still remembers Fazal’s first day on the set of Mirzapur. He re­counts, “When Ali turned up on the first day of shoot, with his boy-next door-looks replete with long, flowy hair and that mil­lion-dollar smile, it was the first time we were meeting after casting him. He’d been shooting for another project and landed straight on our set. There’d been no readings, no rehearsals, and most unusually, no look set for him. So that morning, we met in his vanity van and when he arrived, he asked, ‘So, what’s the look?’ I was hesitant. You don’t simply ask anything drastic of your lead actor on day one. So I said we’ll probably have to go shorter, hoping to push him as the conversation progressed. But he simply picked up a buzzer and said ‘Just go for it then?’ I was hesitant again. But I said, ‘Yeah f* it, go for it.’ And he just buzzed all that beautiful hair there and then. It became kind of symbolic of how he owned the character of Guddu from that point on.”

And in many ways, despite key roles as the beloved manservant and friend Abdul opposite Dame Judi Dench in Stephen Frears’Victoria & Abdul (2017), as well as Zafar bhai in the Fukrey fran­chise, Guddu owns him. As Fazal says, “Mirzapur behaves like its own little monster. It has its own following, peo­ple keeping it alive. One has the muscle memory of the first two seasons but this time, the more manic Guddu becomes, the harder it is to navigate him given he has no set rhythm or personality.” The writers tend to keep his scenes, especially the one involving action, open ended to allow improvisa­tion. “Contrary to belief, improvisa­tion requires a lot more focus, and sometimes they just go on and on,” he says.

Anshuman adds, “Every single time, he was in front of the camera, he went be­yond the script and what was on the page, always bringing more to the character, to the scene. This is the ultimate happiness for a director… for an actor to go beyond what we’ve imagined in our heads.”

Then there is the physical trans­formation which Guddu’s character demands, the bulking up to make him look the part of a don. Fazal admits that as actors they put themselves under extreme stress, losing and gaining muscle for roles. “It’s not healthy,” he agrees, “though I’ve sworn to do it as naturally as possible.” In season one, Guddu was all pure brawn and bulk; in season two, it was all about the anger and thirst for revenge; while in the third season, he has lost the bulk and is trying to use his brain, like the rest of his family. “But he has to also retain that childlike layer, unique to him in that family.”

For the uninitiated, the plot of Mirzapur involves the battle for the business of arms and drugs, run by key families, among them the Tripathis, the Tyagis, the Shuklas, and the newbies, Guddu Pandit (son of an upstanding lawyer) and Golu Gupta (daughter of a docile police official), both nurse grudg­es against the Tripathi father-son.

Fazal is aware of the impact of Guddu on young men in particular, given Guddu’s propensity for physical and verbal abuse. But he says the entire responsibility cannot be the film indus­try’s. “We have to become responsible in homes that watch the show,” he says.

Puneet Krishna, who wrote the first two seasons, says he first got to know Fazal through his work in 3 Idiots; “The way he had left an impact on that role, it was obvious that he was an actor with extraordinary skill. And then, the way he transformed himself (I am talking about more than physical transformation, though he did that too) for Guddu Pandit was insane. From a college boy who was reckless to a wounded animal thirsting for revenge. To add to his acting abilities and soaking emotions like a sponge, Ali bhai is a great human being too. And I think that helps him in portraying complex roles because there is lot of humanity inside him.”

The secret is that he has pursued more than success, something he imbibed from the great Saeed Akhtar Mirza who directed him in the barely seen Ek Tho Chance (2009). He owes his liberalism to Mirza, an early mentor. Fazal takes time off to visit his 88-year-old grandmother every month in Lucknow, in the home he grew up in. His mother died recently, but he is close to his grandmother, his uncle, his wife and children. “That is the home I know,” he says. “My father was usually away.” He and wife, actor Richa Chadha, have started a small chikankari brand to keep the connection alive.

THEIR INTERFAITH union attract­ed a lot of attention, much of it negative, given the polarised climate in the country. They first met at the read­ing of Fukrey (2013) over a decade ago, where love struck while they were eating lunch. They have been rather voluble about their romance, with Chadha speak­ing with delight about her khoobsurat (beautiful) husband, and ignoring all the meanspirited chatter about ‘love jihad’.

There is a new film he has produced with his wife, the multiple award-win­ning Girls Will be Girls. The couple have created their own ecosystem, paying it forward when they can. It is their way of making a change in the system, with the set being dominated by women behind and in front of the camera, allowing for greater sensitivity and compassion. It has also meant the flowering of a brilliant new actor like Preeti Panigrahi, who plays the young schoolgirl on the cusp of adulthood, and a bright new director Shuchi Talati. They hope to choose more such stories to tell the world.

Always curious about new skills, he invests time learning music and improv­ing his diction. It’s an enriching, happy time for him, he says. He has roles in Anurag Basu’s much awaited anthology, Metro…In Dino; Mani Ratnam’s Thug Life, and Rajkumar Santoshi’s Lahore 1947.

It hasn’t been easy. He has sometimes lost out on roles to actors with apparently more name value. He has made the errors that all good-looking young men who enter Bollywood make—playing the male ingenue.

But there have been those who have had faith in him since he began. Anand Tiwari who was to become his director in the breakout web series from Yash Raj Films’ Bang Baaja Baaraat (2015) recalls how Fazal would be much in demand as an actor for plays while he was studying economics at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. “He was a paying guest in Churchgate, and I was in Mahim, and we would sometimes take the late-night train back home from Andheri.” It took Tiwari a long time to convince Fazal to do the web series— which cast him as a small town-born chef trying to wed a posh big city girl—but once he did, he became the internet’s boyfriend.

His longtime friends are happy for him. Roshan Abbas, who directed him in Always Kabhi Kabhi, says, “I’ve seen Ali mature like a fine wine. He now com­mands a frame rather than just being a part of one. He is now finding characters that he can sink his teeth into. Guddu bhaiya now is a muscular actor who flex­es with his emotional prowess in every scene.” At 38, the wine is still young.

actingAli FazalentertainmentMirzapurtelevision