Big or small, when Naseeruddin Shah is on screen, he is bound to steal the show. While the audience is thrilled to see him essay varied characters, the veteran actor prefers to be seen less. Ask him why, and he jokes, “I want to create curiosity about myself.”

However, he explains that it was only at the age of 50 that he began getting interesting roles. Now 73, Shah, who was recently seen in Taj: Divided By Blood and Saas, Bahu Aur Flamingo, is all set to appear in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Charlie Chopra.

“I do whatever I feel like doing. I cannot put a finger on what [roles] excite me. For Vishal, I thought I could try something I hadn’t tried before,” says the actor, who plays a doctor in Charlie Chopra. “Vishal is amazing; he goes on from one project to another without taking a breather. From Charlie Chopra to Khufiya [Bhardwaj’s next], he has already moved on to his next,” shares Shah.

While the actor shines in positive roles, his calibre is best realized in grey characters. But Shah is skeptical about playing an outright antagonist. “Commercial films have the tendency to paint characters in black and white. Villains are one-dimensional in commercial movies without contradictions or weaknesses,” he reasons, adding that compared to the films he did in his initial years, he has been getting meatier roles in the digital boom.

“Now, parts are being written for actors and not famous faces. Where else would you get such fantastic actors like Pankaj Tripathi and Geetanjali Kulkarni? Would they have had the opportunity if everything depended on what the distributor wanted? They [distributors] determine how films should be made, but blame the audience for rejecting the movie when it’s the filmmakers’ fault. A discerning audience won’t reject anything that has genuine material in it.”

On a Vishal Bhardwaj set, an actor needs to maintain that fine balance between thorough prep and spontaneity. Wamiqa Gabbi knows that all too well having worked with the filmmaker on his segment in Modern Love Mumbai (2022), Fursat, and the upcoming Khufiya.

But Gabbi says that shooting for their latest collaboration, Charlie Chopra, was all about homework. “I have never read scripts as many times as I read Charlie Chopra,” she recounts.

Her prep for the Sony LIV series—also starring Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, Lara Dutta and Priyanshu Painyuli—kicked off last December, beginning with workshops along with theatre actor Daminee Benny Basu. Those, coupled with reading sessions with the director and cast, made her camera-ready when Bhardwaj took the mystery thriller on floors in March this year, in Manali.

Gabbi says, “All the reading sessions with Vishal sir and the team helped me understand the nuances of this world even more. Generally, you have questions about the character and situations, but here, I felt ready. It was like I knew everything.”

The first episode of the thriller, which is an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery, recently dropped online.