AK vs ARK: Anil Kapoor, Aditya Roy Kapur on the conclusion to ‘The Night Manager’

Anil Kapoor sits in a casual baby blue shirt, tinted glasses, corduroy white trousers and matching sneakers. An aide lays out his late-afternoon snack, a modest bowl of sliced apples and fresh grapes. Before each interview, Kapoor warmly shakes the reporter’s hand and asks their publication’s name, each of these short exchanges prompting a query, observation or memory.

“When I used to shoot Telugu and Kannada movies in the South, I would get very happy whenever my interviews appeared in The Hindu,” says Kapoor, who debuted with Telugu film Vamsa Vruksham in 1980, on my turn. Having interviewed Kapoor before, I was aware of this stratagem, cordial chitchat to put a journalist at ease and get the conversation flowing. But there was a genuine wistfulness to his words this time, a veteran looking back at his over 40-year old career with wonder and happiness.

That wistfulness is allowed. At 66, Kapoor is settling into his role as an elder statesman of Indian cinema. Physically, he does not appear a dot beyond 40, not a wrinkle on his forehead or a quiver in his voice. But age — not in a bad sense, but in a practical, experiential sense — has ways of catching up with people.

His recent filmography reflects this inflection point: he played a has-been superstar in AK VS AK, a retiring cop in Thar. He is being cast more often as fathers and father figures (Race 3, Jugjugg Jeeyo, the forthcoming Animal). And if there is one title that makes canny use of a grizzled, worldly-wise Anil Kapoor, it is The Night Manager on Disney+ Hotstar.

Anil Kapoor as Shelly in ‘The Night Manager’

Adapted from the John le Carré novel — Hugh Laurie and Tom Hiddleston starred in the British version of the series — The Night Manager stars Kapoor as Shailendra Rungta aka Shelly, a redoubtable arms dealer pulling invisible geopolitical strings from his base in Sri Lanka.

In the first part of the series, released in February, Shaan (Aditya Roy Kapur), the night manager of a plush Dhaka hotel, swears revenge on Shelly and — after much plotting and scheming and seafood-cooking — successfully infiltrates his inner circle.

The final four episodes are out now and focus on Shaan’s cautious manoeuvering of Shelly’s trust. “Shaan’s life has changed in unforeseen ways,” Aditya says of his ex-soldier-turned-spy character. “He is experiencing a lifestyle he never had. The second part plays Shaan’s unpredictability against Shelly’s charm.”

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Shelly in the show is presented as a cipher. Yet, in an early scene, he opens up to Shaan and tells him that he started out young under ‘Byculla Bridge’ in Mumbai. Curiously, the writers (Shridhar Raghavan, Sandeep Modi, Akshat Ghildial and Shantanu Srivastav) wanted to situate Shelly’s origin story in Dongri — co-incidentally, the same place where brothers Karan (Anil Kapoor) and Kishan (Jackie Shroff) get their start in Parinda (1989).

Kapoor smiles when I point out this connection. “Dongri has been done so often in movies that I wanted the reference changed to Byculla Bridge,” he says. “I remember as a kid I would travel from Chembur to South Bombay via Byculla. The visual of that bridge lingered in my mind.”

For each role that he attempts, Kapoor revisits and studies the greatest performances in that genre. For Malang (2020), where he played a cocaine-addicted cop, he looked at Harvey Keitel in Bad Lieutenant (1992). For Thar, a Western, it was a run of Sergio Leone movies. He referenced, unsurprisingly, James Gandolfini in The Sopranos and Marlon Brando and Al Pacino in the Godfather movies for The Night Manager.

“The themes of family and betrayal are absolutely integral to a great crime drama,” he asserts, adding Indian classics like Agneepath, Satya and his own Parinda to the list of great mob pictures.

A still from ‘The Night Manager’

Aditya describes Anil as a ‘super-prepared’ actor who is always ‘open to improvision’. Anil, in turn, praises his young co-star for his ‘earnestness’. “He is a good-looking boy, or rather a man, with a great body and I’m really fond of him,” he says.

On set in Sri Lanka (the series was wrapped up before the ongoing economic crisis took hold calamitously in the island nation), they would hang out without the proprieties of a mentor-mentee relationship. “He would casually drop these pearls of wisdom without making a big deal about it,” Aditya recalls. “…like advising me to do certain films for less money if I really like the director.”

Earlier this year, a video went viral of Anil tearing up at the memorial service of late actor Satish Kaushik, his compatriot from films like Mr. India and Deewana Mastana. Poignantly, one of Kaushik’s final performances, as a portly and empathetic police constable in Thar, was with Anil. “He had come down to watch the film after it was ready and was the first one to assure me it was a fantastic movie. That was my last memory of him.”

For his next, Fighter, Kapoor straps up for some high-altitude aerial action alongside Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone. There is another action project, Subedar, directed by Suresh Triveni, and a sci-fi comedy adapted from the Malayalam film Android Kunjappan Version 5.25. These eclectic choices and the possibility of pouring some lived experiences into them keep him moving, says the actor who entered grandfatherhood last year. “Every day, I try to be like a fresh sponge or blotting paper that soaks everything in, but does not get saturated.”

The Night Manager Part 2 streams on Disney+ Hotstar from June 30.