Actor Manoj Bajpayee has played several noteworthy characters through his career, one of which was the serial killer Raghavan in the 2001 film Aks. Recently, Bajpayee drew similarities between his character of Raghavan in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s film and Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. He even seemed to imply that The Dark Knight had scenes inspired by Aks.
Wary about not sounding ‘pompous’, the actor said that he and his friends often discuss the showdown scene between Raghavan and Amitabh Bachchan’s character in Aks. When he was recently told about the similarity between the Aks scene and the interrogation scene between Batman and The Joker in The Dark Knight, he told Cinema Express, “My friends and I always discuss how we were the first ones to come up with a character similar to The Joker. If we had said this, people might have called us pompous. It took me six to seven months to craft the character of Raghavan. I had the task of embodying absolute evil.
The actor shared that he wanted to portray pure evil in the film. But he realised that even villainty needs to look ‘attractive’ on screen, He added, “I remember I was in Atlanta in the US when I was preparing Manoj Bajpayee character. I was sitting in a bar, and I saw these alcohol bottles that seemed so alluring from the outside, though they contained something that is toxic. I got it then. Evil needed to be attractive.
Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for his performance in The Dark Knight. Manoj Bajpayee was last seen in Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai, which debuted on ZEE5. Next, he has the thriller Joram in the pipeline.
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