He featured in several projects prior to Gully Boy, but that’s the film which brought Vijay Varma into the limelight. He grabbed the audience’s attention with one villainous act after another in Pink, Gully Boy, Darlings and the recent Dahaad, becoming quite the toast of showbiz. Vijay tells us that he loves the madness of his evil characters, but now it’s time to move on to a different space. In his personal life, too, the actor is in a new ‘happy space’ with his lady love.

Vijay is thrilled with all the recognition he’s got for his performances so far, but ask him if he wonders why storytellers don’t look at him beyond the negative characters, and Vijay says, “I picked up these projects because I was impressed by the writing. These are roles that stand out in the script. I like to stand out. I have got enough feedback, where people have said, ‘Ab toh kuch achha (positive) karo, ab toh kuch romantic karo’. The idea was that I had to top the madness quotient while playing these evil characters – just top it and then stop it. So, now I think I have topped it, aur ab mein isse zyada kharab nahi ban sakta on screen.”

The actor, who seized the audience and the industry’s attention with Gully Boy, explains how the film opened doors for him. “Even in Gully Boy, I didn’t have a meaty part, but somehow, the film connected and drew a huge audience, and I got exposed to a larger number of people. After that, I had enough work to keep me on my toes for the next two years, until the lockdown happened. During that phase, I probably worked the hardest. I was literally shooting every single day. I had seven releases in 2020.”

Talking about the inner struggle in playing these characters and much recently, his menacing act in Dahaad he says, “It took some time to understand who the person was. I still don’t know who this guy is. He’s such a sick mind that a sane man can only understand this much about him. See, usually you do try to understand the nitty-gritty of a character. You figure out how the person acts and reacts and incorporate that. But as far as Dahaad is concerned, it was difficult to play it because sometimes you have to go through some kind of inner struggle. Like you don’t like this character, and you don’t want to play this character because on some days you just don’t want to be this nasty person (even on camera).”

Recently, while talking about her relationship with Vijay, Tamannaah Bhatia admitted to being in a relationship with him and called him her happy place. Ask him about matters of the heart, and he says, “I am just in a happy space right now where there’s a lot of love in my life. Both Tamannaah and I have had an interesting journey. I am from Hyderabad and came to Mumbai to work, while she is from Mumbai and went to Hyderabad to work. So that is our trajectory… we both left our cities and moved to other cities for work.”