Abhay Pannu and I handcrafted Vikram Sarabhai’s character for Rocket Boys, says Ishwak Singh

Director Abhay Pannu’s SonyLIV show Rocket Boys (2022) garnered positive reactions from the critics and audiences alike. The web-series followed the lives of iconic physicists Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai and their invaluable contribution towards India’s space mission. Ishwak Singh played Sarabhai, while Jim Sarbh played Bhabha. 

Rocket Boys review: Delightful celebration of Homi Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai and modern Indian science

As the second season of Rocket Boys is expected to release soon, Singh spoke about how he got into the character of Sarabhai.  

“I prepared for Vikram Sarabhai with a multi-prong approach,” he said in a statement. “I wanted to know him inside out – from his childhood days in Ahmedabad to his education [at] Cambridge, the various aspects of his personal and professional life.”

It was through this research that Singh came across the works of celebrated names in this field. “It was like going back to school as I ended up reading science text books, geeked out on lectures by MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] professor Walter Lewin, studied about ISRO [Indian Space Research Organisation], the making of the bomb and modern history. I also studied the basics of rocket science and its evolution and that’s how I got to know about the pioneers like Tsiolkovsky Goddard and Wernher von Braun,” he shared. 

However, despite such in-depth study, Singh always considered Pannu’s script as sacred. “But while I was going about doing peripheral and prep work I’d keep coming back to the script, which was sacrosanct for me and was carved out so meticulously by Abhay Pannu,” the actor revealed. “He had done immense research and had interwoven the highlights of Vikram Sarabhai’s life beautifully in the story. Over a period of 18 months we compared notes and handcrafted the character almost like a sculpture. What encapsulates Vikram Sarbhai is that he was a man of science and that’s how I played him.” 

Rocket Boys (Season 1) also starred Regina Cassandra, Saba Azad, Arjun Radhakrishnan, Rajit Kapur, and Dibyendu Bhattacharya.