Mumbai: Actor Tanuj Virwani has completed twelve years in Hindi screen work, and he describes the stretch as a roller coaster built less on early success than on early failure. In a conversation with The Times of India, he says the first three or four years were especially bruising, and that the lessons arrived through work rather than through any formal instruction.
A second wind from long-form streaming
Virwani credits the rise of long-form streaming with giving his career a fresh start. He is candid about preparation: he is not a trained actor, and the set itself has served as school and gurukul—at once workshop and playground. That detail matters because it describes a generation of Hindi screen performers who built craft inside OTT’s longer schedules rather than in acting institutes.
For our readers, the useful frame is continuity rather than reinvention. Streaming did not simply add episodes; it created a middle ground where an actor could keep failing, correcting and returning—an apprenticeship model that the older film release calendar seldom allowed.
He is careful not to treat the platform as the point. Film, web series or micro-drama: by his account, the preparation for a role does not change. What changes is the company—the technicians, writers and actors around him.
- Twelve years in, he still describes himself as hungry for work.
- OTT, not formal training, gave him the long-form space to grow.
- Inside Edge allowed him to play the same character at three different life stages.
- His advice for rough patches: return to the reason you started.
Why long-form suits him
Citing Inside Edge, he points to a structural advantage of web series: playing one character over years lets an actor revisit and reinterpret a part at different points. That is difficult in a two-hour film, where the character usually exists in a single arc. It is also why OTT has become a training ground and a second innings for performers whose film debut did not settle the question.
That also explains why his language is not about stardom but about survival: he measures the decade in lessons rather than in fame or money.
The cost of the work
He also notes the ordinary strain of the profession: with his daughter now in play school, travelling together has become harder, and he sometimes sees her only before she sleeps and briefly in the morning. He describes that as the price of being the family’s breadwinner.
The deeper point is about longevity. Virwani’s formula for surviving the quiet months is not complicated: develop a tough skin, keep resolve, and keep faith in why you became an actor. “You do it for the love of the art and the craft. Everything else is secondary,” he says. It is, he argues, the clearest way to outlast a profession that can feel lonely when the calls are not coming.
Source: The Times of India
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