Was expecting Tandav to be a typical, age-old saga, says Sunil Grover

Over the years, Sunil Grover has gained renown for playing comic characters on television. But he will be seen in a new avatar in Ali Abbas Zafar’s web-series Tandav, which stars Saif Ali Khan. 

Grover admitted in a statement that he didn’t get his hopes up about the project before reading the script as he wasn’t expecting anything new from the show. 

“In Tandav, I will not be seen wearing a saree and making people laugh. Upon hearing about the show at first, I was expecting the age-old political saga, void of any difference or newness. But when I read the script for the very first time, I was proved wrong. Tandav, with its extremely gripping plotline, had me so hooked, I couldn’t stop reading it until I was done with the entire script. The show’s multi-layered characters fascinated me,” he said. 

Grover plays the character of Gurpal, the man Friday of Samar Pratap Singh (Khan), a powerful politician and the head of a leading political party in India. The actor said that playing Gurpal was a welcome break from the run-of-the-mill funny characters. 

“I feel somewhere I was stuck in a monotonous cycle wherein I’d only get a part of a certain calibre to play. I was hardly considered for roles that went beyond being funny and comic. I never thought Ali Abbas Zafar would ever cast me for such a serious and intense character. I was surprised when Ali told me that I was his first choice for Gurpal’s character, and he had full faith in me to do justice to the character,” said Grover. 

The actor was also an integral part of Zafar’s last project, the Salman Khan-starrer Bharat (2019). The filmmaker’s inputs helped Grover in Tandav. “I’ve been used to comic roles and bits. Ali taught me how this character would be played differently. I thoroughly enjoyed this new experience in the entire process of bringing an interesting flavour to the table,” he said. 

Tandav will be streamed on Amazon Prime Video from 15 January.