A star is Sworn

From turning heads with impactful roles to playing heroes such as Udham Singh and Sam Manekshaw on screen, Vicky Kaushal has become one of the best actors of his generation. The next step, with bigger hits, could be stardom

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

Close to 90 minutes into Sam Bahadur, which released last December, Field Marshal Manekshaw (a masterly Vicky Kaushal) sits down for an interview with a woman journalist in Kashmir. It is July 1969, and he has just been made Army chief. The lady asks him why the busy man was in Kashmir and not Delhi; was war imminent? “Oh no sweetie! I keep meeting my jawans very often. I feel alive around them,” he replies. The journalist, taken aback, asks if he addresses everyone that way, because she felt he was flirting with her. And then, in his trademark style, Manekshaw bends forward, giving her his full attention, his light eyes twinkling with humour and head slightly tilted sideways, and says, “Sweetie, had I been flirting with you, then be sure this interview would have gone much longer.”

It is one of the most impressive eight seconds of film acting in recent history— with a few words and loads of charm, an actor pulls you into his character’s world. So close is the portrayal, in terms of both body language and disposition, that one could easily believe this was Manekshaw himself.

It might seem unusual to say, especially as the actor already has a national award on his shelf, but this role was Kaushal’s career-defining moment. To get it right, he had to go beyond the field marshal’s light eyes and bushy moustache. “Vicky internalised the slouch and the hunch around the shoulders so well, despite being taller than Sam,” says Bhavani Iyer, the scriptwriter who worked with Kaushal on Raazi and Sam Bahadur. “And once, when he was on a break and needed to complete a dance sequence for another film, the dance director told him, ‘Sir, if you can please straighten your shoulders’; Vicky was still in Sam mode.”