Tahir Raj Bhasin on back-to-back releases, playing the ‘hero’.

Tahir Raj Bhasin is on a career high. The actor has had four back-to-back releases in just a matter of a few months. While he is enjoying the positive feedback, the actor is clearly hungry for more. In this interview, he also shares his belief that more work one does, the more acceptance you get, whether among the fraternity or audience.

It has been a good year for you.

By far, it is the best year of my career. I wake up feeling encouraged that people are accepting my work and there is validation. To have back-to-back releases means that you have to have back-to-back shoots as well. So, for the past two years, I’ve been shooting continuously, and it just so happened that the stars have aligned and all the films came out at a really great time. This has also allowed me to open a new chapter of doing ‘romantic leads’. Even within that scope, I am doing such diverse projects. You can see how different Yeh Kaali Kaali Aankhein and Looop Lapeta are, despite being on the same platform.

The more work one does, the more acceptance you get from the fraternity and the audience. The audience today is so different than say what it was five year ago, just in terms of the diverse content that they are exposed to. Just recently, this beautiful south Indian superhero film, Minnal Murali, came out. It has such a fab concept and has done really well. Then there are Korean films dubbed in Hindi or with subtitles that could be doing well too. So, the idea of making stories more mainstream has become a possibility.

Being a romantic hero is my comfort zone. Growing up in the 90s, that was the kind of cinema we saw, and that’s my idea of ‘hero’. So, when I got Mardaani as my first film, I really took it up as a challenge. I had to push my craft in trying to achieve that intense grey character. Back in the day, people would call it anti-hero and there is a certain charm to play these characters as there is a kind of mystery that they bring along. Picking a variety of roles has been a conscious decision for me. I am glad that after Mardaani, I got Force 2 that was full of action; then came Chhichore, a college drama; then I had Manto opposite Nawazuddin Siddiqui, which was directed by Nandita Das and went to Cannes. I recently did 83.