Amol Parashar on exploring contrasts and staying curious as an actor

Actor Amol Parashar is in no mood to slow down. With two sharply contrasting OTT projects—Kull, a gripping ensemble drama, and Gram Chikitsalay, a grounded rural comedy—releasing within days of each other, the actor is clearly enjoying a creatively charged moment. But even that isn’t the full story. Amol has also made a daring return to the stage with Besharam Aadmi, a one-man play he helped shape and perform entirely solo. Amol takes us through his characters.

How do you feel about having back-to-back releases?

It is not something that I could decide as an actor. I have been doing all these projects over the last two-three years and they just happen to come around the same time. When anything comes out that you work hard on, it’s a good feeling. You work, you create something and then it eventually only has some meaning when it reaches people. Hopefully, they like it. But even if they don’t, the circle only completes when it gets its audience.

You being an urbanite yourself, were you able to relate to your character Dr Prabhat Sinha in Gram Chikitsalay?

It kind of worked for me in the texture of the show, because that’s supposed to be an urban guy travelling to a village. I’m not as urban or as rich as my character Dr Prabhat Sinha. He comes from a well-off background. His father being a doctor and having his own hospital in Delhi, one can imagine what kind of socio-economic background that is. And probably this is the first time he might have gone to a village physically, which is not the case with me. I’ve seen villages. I have relatives who live in rural areas. So I’ve had that exposure. As an actor, you’re aware of the kind of feelings, thoughts and the kind of reactions that one may have when they experience it for the first time. And you kind of transport that into a person who may be experiencing it for the first time. He's willing. He's ready. In fact, in this case, Dr. Prabhat really wants to go there and do his job. But a new place always comes with some surprises. Some mismatching expectations. And real-time playing out of events. I think that is what we were going for in the story.

Your character in Kull seems to be different from the ones you have played before. What attracted you to the script?

It’s not often that a character which is unlike the body of work that you have done before, comes to you. And in the past too, there have been those characters that have come to me. But I didn’t want to do it just for the sake of doing something different. I would rather wait for a good script or a well-etched out character or a good team. That’s what happened with Kull. It was as a character, different from my body of work before that. But at the same time, it was a strong team. It was backed by director Sahir Raza and had an ensemble cast including Nimrat Kaur, Ridhi Dogra, and Gaurav Arora. So this seemed like a great opportunity for me to take up.

Many people still know you as Chitwan Sharma from the Trippling series. What do you have to say about that?

I think it is a greater victory for an actor. I think when people know you as a character, it definitely is proof that you are famous and loved for your work and not for any other reason. So I have always taken that as a positive sign.

I've always been happy that people are able to see and connect with the character so much that it is quite possible that they forget the actor behind it or they may not even care. Of course, when you do other work and people discover you in different shades and formats, they try to see you as a whole. But for many people, I was Chitwan for a while before they started discovering other shades of me through other characters. But I think with Gram Chikitsalay, now it has started to shift. Now I am Dr. Prabhat for many of them. For the same people who said, you will always be Chitwan, nothing will ever replace Chitwan. But it's nice to be able to give them something new and fresh and still have as much impact.

Let’s talk about Besharam Aadmi. What made you create it?

I wanted to go back on stage because I started my acting career there. My plan was to be on stage alone for, let’s say, a whole piece for 60 minutes. I’d never done it before, and was scary. But it was something that I had lived with for the last two-three years. And I’d been reading and investing in all the shows and actors who do this format of one-man theatre. I also tried writing a couple of ideas that I had in my mind.

And one day, Vijay Ashok Sharma, who is the writer of this piece, came into my life. He was a friend of a friend. He was a friend of a friend. And my friend told me that he wanted to read something out to me that he had written, that he thought I might be fit for, which is a one-man piece. In the middle of the piece while he was reading out to me, I realised how suited that material was for me. And in some ways, what I was trying to do, the show that I was trying to create, was more ambitious in its story and its execution. And so decided to make this the first piece. 

We have had four shows so far. We have a show in Bengaluru next week, which is going to be our first show outside of Mumbai.

Can we expect you on big screens soon?

I don’t know. Maybe. In the last few years, I’ve been doing a lot of films. It’s just that because of COVID and other reasons, all of those films have come out on OTT. You don’t always know what’s going to happen with this because that’s the nature of films right now. People are making interesting films. And then eventually, when the film is ready and made, the producers and the distributors take that call about what is the best way to distribute the film. I would rather do interesting films and shows and characters than worry about where it’s going to be.

I know a lot of people talk about wanting to be seen on the big screen. I haven't developed that attachment yet. Once I experience it, maybe I'll be able to give a more honest answer about how I feel. But right now, I'm happy because most of the love I've got, most of the work I've got, most of the interesting characters that come to me are mostly on OTT. And that's where the experimentation is happening more than theatrical films. 

Kull is streaming on Jio Hotstar and Gram Chikitsalay is on Amazon Prime Video.

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