Vijay Varma has not portrayed a complex, flawed men on screen for the first time. His Sasyya, a notorious narcotics dealer, in Imtiaz Ali’s She received a lot of praise, and so did his character Moeen in Gully Boy.
Darlings is a movie which shows a woman’s fight to freedom from her toxic, violent husband. But Vijay Varma, who was seen playing the role of Hamza Shaikh in this movie directed by Jasmeet K Reen , wants to leave his wife-beating character behind. “It is a difficult experience watching yourself be this man you hate. But I am done watching this film. I am never going to revisit it, I know it for a fact,” the actor said.
But Darlings was not like anything he had done before, Vijay says. “What we had to do while making we did, what I had to see while watching, I have seen. I left the film soon after shooting it. The feeling of how it will be received and all the fear that I had are now put to rest. I am in a good space, finally,” Vijay added.
The actor also told that his favourite sequences in the films are the ones which are not with either Badru or her mother Shamshu. “My favourite scenes are with Zulfi (Roshan Mathew). Those are the scenes that I can watch without feeling a lot of… I hate Hamza to the core, but the scene where they both are on the scooter and he asks, ‘Is this scent or powder? Are girls impressed by this?’ I kind of enjoy that scene,” he said.
Vijay managed to successfully make the audience hate Hamza. He showcased him perfectly as a violent and toxic man. “I didn’t want to water down his personality. I wanted to keep it potent. It works like that because in the first three scenes, if you don’t feel enough hatred, dread against him, then the revenge–the second half of the film–won’t be very rewarding for the audience. I tried to keep him as real as possible. “
He also said, “I didn’t want any residue of the other characters I have played before, especially Gully Boy. It has stayed in people’s minds so we stayed away from the Dharavi lingo and kept it close to Byculla. I visited the place, hung out with those people, spent a lot of time with the boys from the area. It paid off well.”
