It's 2021. The hindi film industry, like the rest of the country, is staring at uncertainty due to COVID-19. At home, actor Gagan Dev Riar wonders how he will pay next month’s rent. A call interrupts his thoughts and changes his life. “It was a casting call. I was told they wanted to test me for the lead part of Mr Abdul Karim Tegli’s role,” he recalls.

It’s 2023, two years later, and Riar’s phone hasn’t stop ringing with calls from all around the country to congratulate him for his portrayal of Telgi in Hansal Mehta’s Scam 2003. “A couple of days ago, at 4 am, some people called me. I don’t know their names. They, I think, were a little drunk and they wanted to organize a party for me somewhere. They said, ‘We will put up your hoardings and we will do parties, sir.’ I was laughing sitting in my room,” Riar chuckles.

But he remembers his first audition for the show being less than perfect. “I was not very excited about it because those were little depressing times for all of us courtesy COVID. So, I just prepared a little bit and I went for the audition. They didn’t enjoy it. ‘We have seen you perform on stage, do something like that, magical,’ I was told. I realized I was taking it a little lightly. I should not have. I wasn’t doing my job properly,” he says.

His theatre career has been prolific: He is notably known for his portrayal of Sir Toby Belch, which won him the META award for best supporting actor 2014 for Piya Behroopiya (A Hindi adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night).

The feedback altered something within him, and he invested a couple of days into preparing his own script for the next audition. And magic happened. “Hansal sir got on a call with me after the new audition. He said, ‘Gagan, it was a beautiful audition and from my side, you are confirmed. Just give me a week’s time. I’ll just convince Sony people and Applause Entertainment because they also have to make decisions’. Within one week he called me again and said, ‘We are on. Just start putting on weight now.’ It was all of very filmy,” he smiles.

The moment of filmy fantasy didn’t last too long as Riar dived into the process of physically transforming into Telgi that turned out more daunting than he expected. Gagan candidly shares that the weight gain journey almost caused him body image issues.

“I did have my weaker moments when I was gaining the weight. I wasn’t able to look at myself in the mirror because I never knew that I could look like this. I told my nutritionist I was getting depressed because I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. He said, ‘Put curtain on your mirrors till the time you finish the shoot to avoid it,’” Riar shares. 

When the shoot finally began April last year, the actor found his concerns vanishing in no time. “My acting has always helped me gain that confidence back. A compliment on a good shot boosts your ego. Then you take that one little ounce of confidence and take another step, and then you take one day at a time. That’s how I completed this journey,” he says.

The emotional ride that he took to bring the man, who committed one of the biggest financial frauds in the country to life, was far more enjoyable for Riar, though. Even though the series is based on the book Telgi: Ek Reporter ki Diary, the actor considered the script his Bible and showrunner Mehta, his guide.

“Flawed is the word to use for Telgi. Many people use the word criminal and scamster. Yes, there was a scam and yes it was a crime, but I would love to go with the word flawed. Hansal sir actually gave me this idea that I should not think of him as a villain. If I do that, I’ll not be able to play it with the honesty and humanity because at the end of the day, we all are humans and we all are flawed,” he says.

He also added, “Every character has a vulnerability. Telgi also had his weak as well as strong moments. He loved and he hated, everything that a human being does in his or her life. That’s how I wanted to go about it,” he explains.

For now, he is the actor of the moment. When he met Pratik Gandhi recently, the actor who played Harshad Mehta in Scam 1992, Gandhi had some life advice to impart. “At the Scam party, we clicked many photographs together and I said to him, ‘I haven’t done this ever before. How long will the photo session go for?’ He replied, ‘Get used to it now,’” the actor says.