Arjun Rampal is not interested in being the headline. That is a deliberate position for an actor whose new ZEE5 thriller Blind Game is his first lead Hindi film in five years. “I don’t like it when people say, ‘Oh, this is an Arjun Rampal film,’” he told Cinema Express. “It’s a Sangeeth Sivan film.”
That framing matters because Blind Game is the final directorial work of Sangeeth Sivan, who died in 2024. Arjun describes Sivan as “an amazing man,” and says the director had already begun writing a sequel before his death. The film reworks the 2014 Malayalam thriller 7th Day, reset across one night in Manali. Arjun says the minimalism is the draw: “I like the fact that it’s grounded.”
Why the film resists gadget-led thrills
Where many contemporary thrillers chase artificial intelligence and elaborate devices, Blind Game leans on a simple, contained premise. Arjun argues that this is the harder route, because an audience can sense when a thriller stops feeling organic. He also warns viewers not to look for plot details in advance: “You should go in blind for Blind Game.”
That secrecy is not coyness. Arjun says the film has twists that may reward repeat viewing, and there is a comic streak in his character that he refuses to explain beforehand.
A 3000-crore surprise and the work behind it
The conversation also touches on Dhurandhar, the Aditya Dhar-directed franchise in which Arjun plays Major Iqbal. He says the team believed they had made “something special,” but nobody expected the two parts to become a reported 3000 crore-plus grosser. Even so, he measures the experience less by the box office number than by intent: “Every department’s heart was in the right place,” he says.
- Blind Game: ZEE5 release; Sangeeth Sivan’s final film; a Manali-set retelling of 7th Day.
- Dhurandhar: reported 3000 crore-plus combined gross across two parts; Arjun did not anticipate the scale.
- Operation Ganga: multilingual project with Mohanlal; Arjun speaks English, Hindi and Russian.
Stardom, muscle memory and the next film
Arjun has built a career on brooding and damaged characters, from The Last Lear to Daddy and Major Iqbal. He argues that layered characters stay with an actor. Revisiting Rock On!! after six years, he says, brought Joe Mascarenhas back through muscle memory the moment he picked up a guitar: “Like another person had been living inside me all those years.”
His relationship with stardom is similarly measured. “Every time I start behaving like a star, I get a big tight reality check from God,” he says. Actors, he argues, lose their raw material when they cut themselves off from ordinary life.
Next is Operation Ganga with Mohanlal. Arjun says it is a multilingual project, not strictly a Malayalam film, and he performs his own lines in English, Hindi and Russian with sync sound. He praises Mohanlal’s energy and refusal to use a body double for stunts, calling him “an absolute legend.”
Source: Cinema Express
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