Beyond the Hero

RGV also used new and relatively unknown faces for all his underworld movies apart from the Sarkar series. His Telugu movie Gaayam that was released in 1993 had newcomer Jagapathi Babu playing the lead. ‘Satya’ brought fame to the unknown duo of J.D Chakravarty and Manoj Bajpai. Vivek Oberoi’s role in ‘Company’ as an underworld gangster won him the ‘Best Debut’ filmfare award. RGV thinks that casting newcomers works for the underworld movies because it brings in an element of unpredictability. “When people ask me my thing of casting new actors, it works in a scene because people have never seen that guy, I can play around with the audience’s imagination. If I take a big name in the effort of trying to match somebody with Amitabh Bachchan, somebody like Danny Denzongpa or Amrish Puri, I don’t think the scene will be effective enough because subconsciously the audience will feel the final outcome thereby making it predictable. With the new guy they won’t know what to make of him… how big he is? How small he is? And what he can do? That unpredictability of an unknown face I think works very well in films of this genre.” (Source: http://rgvarma.spaces.live.com).

The unknown new hero perhaps works very well because the story usually dwells much beyond the hero. There are usually characters in RGV films who have performed just as well as the hero did or may be even better. In the Telugu movie ‘Gaayam’, Kota came up with an amazing performance as the rival gangster of the hero-Jagapathi Babu. ‘Satya’ had Manoj Bajpai playing the role of Bheeku Matre to perfection. Vivek Oberoi and Ajay Devgan had almost equal roles in ‘Company’ and Malayalam superstar Mohanlal playing the cop had a meaty role as well. The lack of ‘star power’ thus never affected any of these movies. There was a strong script and then there were other characters apart from the hero (as in other Bollywood movies) running the story.

RGV thus seem to lay more emphasis on the story which is concept or the signified by purposely underplaying the signifiers (the actors in this case). By casting unknown faces in the lead roles, RGV seems to make sure the attention of the audience remains with the story. Even in cases where the actors or signifiers have the star-value (as in Sarkar and Sarkar Raj) RGV seems to tune the signifiers to the story or (the concept or signified) that he is trying to narrate rather than dominate it.