Nobody hurts on screen like Sukant Goel. The stage and film actor’s skill—as demonstrated in memorable roles in Kapoor & Sons, Ghost Stories, Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar, Dobaaraa and Monica, O My Darling—is in drawing us in with his diminutive everyman vibe. Until, that is, someone turns the knife. This happens unforgettably in the opening scene of Monica, as Sukant’s face, soft and reassuring at first, contorts and trembles in violent jealousy. “There’s a lot of nascent violence I observe in people around me,” says Sukant, sitting in a grey cap and tee at a Versova café and looking nothing like the dorky nonentities he plays on screen.
I’ve been meaning to interview Sukant for a while now. For some years, he’s been the little man on the edges of our films, a contrast to his established stardom as a theatre actor-director. He’s a current favourite of directors like Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap and Vasan Bala. He is yet to shoulder meaty, paradigm-altering parts in Hindi films, but once you’ve seen a Sukant Goel performance, no matter how small or ancillary, it’s hard to shake from your mind.
Sukant was born in Muzaffarnagar, UP. His parents are doctors. Early on, he was sent to boarding school in Dehradun and later completed Chemical Engineering from Mumbai. After working for a year and a half in a mining company in Ivory Coast, he returned to India in 2009 to pursue acting seriously. “There was a lot of misguided ambition in me,” he laughs. “I wanted to be a star. But living in Mumbai, attending Satyadev Dubey’s theatre workshop, changed all that. Though I still had film on my mind, I got into theatre passionately.”
That’s a lovely contradiction about Sukant. On stage, he’s known for performing advanced, avant-garde, absurdist theatre. But look him up on YouTube and a different sort of actor emerges. He has mimicked Salman Khan in a viral video for The Screen Patti (it has over 6.5 million views). Another video, ‘Every Non-Veg Lover Ever’, for FilterCopy, went even wilder. He’s the best thing about the first season of The Better Half, a low-rent sketch series essentially stringing together a bunch of good-humoured wife jokes. “It got a bit disgruntling for me after a while,” he admits. “The show was just repeating itself. I told the makers I’ve stopped watching it. I don’t think they took it nicely.”
Sukant first worked with Dibakar Banerjee on Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar. Appearing for just a couple of scenes, he all but steals it as a 'baby-faced' bank manager who pounces on Parineeti Chopra’s corporate rogue. When the film, shot in 2018, got stuck, Dibakar called him back for another script. This became Ghost Stories (on Netflix), one of Sukant’s finest performances. An unnamed educationist comes to a small town and gets stuck among literal and allegorical zombies. Attempting horror for the first time, Sukant could draw on his years of doing physical theatre. “I’d done a children’s play called James and the Giant Peach based on Roald Dahl’s story. It helped me figure out timing and tempo. What’s the best way to run so it’s scary and funny at the same time?”
Sukant says he’s finally opening up to the Hindi mainstream. Earlier this year, he endured multiple slaps in the Ranveer Singh-led comedy Jayeshbhai Jordaar. “Once the shot was done, Ranveer sent a bottle of Thums-up for my troubles.” His next is a series set in the Andamans. Anurag Kashyap—who directed him in Dobaaraa and is a fan of his theatre work—has a big web show planned with him. He was also asked to audition for the Hindi remake of Angamaly Diaries but passed it on. “They were going to set it in Goa. My heart sank. It felt too early.”
What makes him tick as an actor? I ask Sukant over his second coffee. Coming from a small town, he says, “I did not have access to a lot of things. It made me insecure. Acting is a way to overcome that.”
#killer #instincts #ofSukantGoel
