Vivek Oberoi: Scars of Vikrant Dhawan on ‘Inside Edge’ serve as reminder for vengeance

Mumbai:  Vivek Oberoi has returned as Vikrant Dhawan, in the latest season of Prime Video original series ‘Inside Edge’.

The third season of the hugely popular series took some time to surface owing to the pandemic and the subsequent delays. But, now the game seems to have gone a step further as Vivek’s character of Vikrant comes back with vengeance.

Vivek recently spoke with IANS about the latest season, the thrill of getting back into his character and how he used his character’s scars to sketch the theme of ‘revenge’ in the show.

Shedding light on the challenges that he faced for getting back into the character after a while, the actor says, “Before I went on the first day of shoot for Season 3, I can’t tell you how nervous I was. I was feeling like how I was when I was making my debut. I did have (some) trouble with it. There are two things: One, you’re coming back into the world of ‘Inside Edge’ after a while. You are expected to stay true to Vikrant Dhawan’s grain, the character that you played in Season 1 and Season 2 and are expected to carry that truth in Season 3.”

He lauds the show writer for giving the actors a solid source material to build upon, “But the writers that we have on ‘Inside Edge’ are phenomenal. In each season there was a new challenge where they would create a whole new arc and a whole different evolution of that character.”

He adds, “In this season, there’s a whole different graph to Vikrant Dhawan. So even though it’s the same character, you have to make it different and yet make it look like it has continuity. So that to me was an amazing challenge and luckily I could pull it off but while we were shooting for the initial few days I was quite nervous.”

Commenting on how the prosthetic scars of Vikrant helped him deliver a calculated performance, Vivek says, “In this season, you see Vikrant pre the scar and Vikrant post the scar. So you see the whole journey. After I finished my process of getting into the character I would lie back and the prosthetics team would make a scar on my face.”

He continues, “I purposely would not see while it (the scar) was being made. But, the minute they made the scar, I’d open my eyes, touch the scar and I’d immediately transform to Vikrant Dhawan, who has flown to the top, crashed to the bottom and is now rising back. I’d touch the scar, and it served as a reminder to fuel his vengeance.”

When probed how much has he changed as an actor from Season 1 to Season 3 of ‘Inside Edge’, the actor quips, “Season 1 to Season 3 has almost taken 5 years. There is a maturity in me as a person, as an actor and also the maturity of the medium that comes into play here.”

Talking about the evolution of the medium of OTT vis-a-vis ‘Inside Edge’, he says, “When we started we were trying to draw a theatrical audience to see a different medium which is OTT and adapt to the OTT space. But there is already a niche audience which is your real audience at this point and it’s a very discerning audience, which is watching ‘Breaking Bad’, ‘Fargo’, ‘Game of Thrones’ etc. You can’t irk that audience because that’s the only audience that you have.”

“At the same time you have to entice theatrical audiences and tell them, ‘Why don’t you sample this and try?’ So, it was a tightrope walk that we had to do as actors, writers, directors and creators. Now that we are past that stage, we can experiment and push the boundaries,” Vivek signs off.

(IANS)