For Manoj Bajpayee, preparation begins with the page, and the page has to look right. In a conversation with filmmaker Neeraj Pandey around their Netflix thriller Gajab Raat, the actor said he cannot absorb Hindi dialogue unless it is written in Devanagari. The remark opens a window into how script format shapes performance, and it drew a gentle pushback from his director.
The script is part of the performance
Bajpayee was direct about the constraint. “My handicap is I cannot memorize a Hindi line if it is not written in the Devanagari script,” he said. He placed himself alongside two actors he said follow the same practice: Amitabh Bachchan and Pankaj Tripathi.
The preference is not merely about tradition. For an actor working in Hindi, Devanagari functions as a visual and phonetic anchor, keeping the word on the page closer to how it will be spoken. That small production detail can affect stress, diction and the rhythm of a scene.
Pandey says the habit is wider than assumed
Neeraj Pandey challenged the framing that only a handful of stars insist on Devanagari. “That’s a myth. A lot of other actors do that,” the filmmaker said, noting that performers regularly ask for scripts in the script that works for them.
That has a practical implication for Hindi film production: script teams often need to deliver material in more than one format, just as they would handle different drafts. The real story may be less about individual “handicaps” and more about how quietly standard the request has become.
A thriller with a dark comic register
The conversation around Gajab Raat also mapped Pandey’s attempt to stretch a familiar grammar. He said black humour had once been fun in a short film, Ouch!, but a feature-length mix of suspense and dark comedy was a new challenge.
“You have to look around you for black humor. Trust me, that’s where black humor is,” Pandey said. Bajpayee, who plays the unpredictable Nivrit, hoped audiences respond: “His mind is very quirky, is very unpredictable. So I just hope that people like it as much as I loved playing him.”
Here is what the exchange underlines:
- Devanagari is not a quirk but a memorisation tool for actors working in Hindi.
- More performers ask for scripts in the native script than the industry conversation assumes.
- Gajab Raat is Pandey’s feature-length test of combining thriller tension with black humour.
From title controversy to Netflix
Gajab Raat premiered on Netflix on October 23, 2026. Directed by Ritesh Shah and produced by Pandey’s Friday Storytellers, the film also stars Nushrratt Bharuccha, Saqib Saleem, Akshay Oberoi, Divya Dutta and Kiku Sharda. It was earlier titled Ghooskhor Pandat; after objections that the title mixed a corruption slur with a caste-identifying word, the makers changed it before release to avoid further offence.
For readers who follow Hindi cinema’s craft closely, the Devanagari exchange is a useful reminder that the decisions audiences never see—how a script is typed, how a line is remembered—are often where a performance begins.
Source: The Times of India
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