For Kunal K Kapoor, a four-year gap from acting was never meant to be a break from cinema. If anything, it gave him more time to reconnect with the part of filmmaking that drew him to the industry in the first place — storytelling. Now, with his Telugu debut Vishwambhara, Kannada debut Lambodhara 2.0, Nitesh Tiwari’s magnum opus Ramayana and three scripts of his own in the works, Kunal is stepping back into a busy phase of his career, but on his own terms.

He says, “The break gave me a chance to develop the stories I really wanted to tell. At my core, I am a storyteller. I’ve been writing for years and just finished three scripts. Those are films that I’d like to act in. The break happened because I haven’t got the kind of work that I was excited about, but now I see a lot of that coming around.”

This year, Kunal’s film Rang De Basanti, directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, marked its 20th anniversary. Reflecting on the film’s enduring legacy, Kunal says, “We were just telling an interesting story. It was not like we believed that we were setting out to do something so important that would be remembered 20 years later.”

The actor thinks that the possibility of making a film with that kind of cultural resonance still exists. The challenge, he says, is finding the right story. “I think the possibility of telling an interesting story still exists. It’s only about finding those interesting stories together. But those are far and few in between. I meet so many people who come up to me and say, ‘Rang De Basanti jaisi picture aur banao na.’ And I’m like, sure, but you have to find the content for it, right?”

Ask him about his experience of being part of Nitesh Tiwari’s much-anticipated film Ramayana, in which he plays Lord Indra, and he replies, “I enjoyed being on that set because it felt meditative. It was quiet. I’ve never been on such a quiet set. Usually our sets are crazy. There’s so much noise and chaos. But the sets of Ramayana felt different. Everyone seemed to feel like they were part of something they genuinely cared about. That doesn’t happen often. I think it’s a combination of Nitesh sir’s energy and also the kind of film that we’re making.”

A project as culturally significant as Ramayana was always going to attract scrutiny, particularly in the age of social media. The trailer brought with it a flood of opinions, from casting choices to the appearance of its characters. Kunal, however, sees the online reaction as a consequence of how audiences consume and discuss cinema today.

“We live in a world where everyone has access to expressing their opinion. When I was starting off, we had three newspapers and those three would have a review and you probably had one show on TV that reviewed movies. You either had to be part of a television network or a newspaper network to express how you felt about something. But today, everybody can express what they feel online. We live in a world where the more aggressive you are, or the more you attack something, the more likely you are to go viral. So virality is not necessarily based on just expressing your opinion; it’s based on how aggressively you express your opinion.”

Kapoor is also venturing into south cinema with back-to-back projects in Telugu and Kannada. While he doesn’t find the filmmaking process fundamentally different, he says there is one aspect that struck him — the continuity of language throughout the filmmaking process.

He says, “The only difference that I find, and which is one of the reasons that a lot of films from the south industries feel more rooted, is that everybody is operating in one language. For instance, if I’m doing a Telugu film, that film is written in Telugu first. Everybody on that set speaks mostly in Telugu. Then you go and say your lines in Telugu. So the whole process is in one language. That doesn’t happen on the set of Hindi films.”