Exclusive! Vijay Varma on playing an abusive man in Darlings: Such broken people exist in real world, we just have to look around

For versatile Bollywood actor Vijay Varma, fame may have come knocking at his door relatively late in life but with so many interesting projects in the pipeline, we know he is in it for the long haul.

At the song launch of his latest big-banner movie Darlings, we asked him about preparing for the role of a man who is quite evidently troubled and broken in the movie. “I think you just have to look around. I think there’s a lot of broken people around and so many broken stories around,” Varma told OTTplay.

He then went on to explain that it is not the violence and abuse that’s hard to conjure up in an actor’s head, but "how it’s executed" that plays a crucial part in the narrative. “Jasmeet (director) and I spoke at length about it and the script is complete in itself and if the actor has a decent imagination, he can pick up from there and create a universe out of it. The task is for it to play it out and for that, you need trust and respect with the crew members. Especially with the actor you are working with,” the actor further added.

He was quick to clarify that there’s immense mutual respect and comfort between Alia Bhatt and him in real life, thus making it easier for the series of events to play out in front of the camera. 

“… Me and Alia had that kind of regard and respect and comfort with each other. We were handled with very soft gloves while doing all these things (referring to the abuse in the film). These roles as much as they do not look nice, they exist in the real world. Sab tarah ke log hote hain. We cannot say that sab theek hai. Even these characters exist and need to be shown,” concluded the actor. 

For the uninitiated, Netflix’s Darlings is Alia Bhatt’s first film production under her banner Eternal Sunshine in collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment.

Directed by debutante Jasmeet K. Reen, Darlings features Alia Bhatt, Vijay Varma, Shefali Shah and Roshan Mathew in central roles. The dark comedy is releasing globally on Netflix on August 5, 2022.