Kamlesh Tukaram Sawant’s Sub-Inspector Laxmikant Gaitonde returns in Drishyam: The Conclusion, and cinema halls are treating him less like a supporting character than a pantomime villain. Sawant says a friend described hoots at his first appearance and a woman shouting “Kill this guy at the first chance!” before dancing and clapping at his eventual beating. He takes it as a compliment.
The line “Madira pikar so gaye, chee chee chee” has already turned into meme currency. Sawant says he had little doubt it would catch on because writer Aamil Keeyan Khan writes dialogue with a sense of what audiences will repeat. His wife, he adds, has been keeping up with the memes.
A cop image that started with a haircut
Long before Bollywood put him in uniform, Sawant says, strangers in Mumbai had already done the casting. Growing up in Kala Chowki, he and his brothers took the same ₹5 “soldier cut” at the salon, partly to avoid another visit for a month and a half. People would ask whether he was in the army. “The public did my casting, even when I was in tenth grade,” he says.
That look carried into Hindi cinema. He debuted as a constable in Khakee (2004), played inspectors in Force (2011) and Bhoothnath Returns (2014), and then became Gaitonde in Drishyam (2015). In Marathi cinema, he says, the range is wider—village heads, politicians and other negative characters—but Hindi films have mostly kept him in khaki.
Why this role hit louder than its screen time
Drishyam: The Conclusion, directed by Abhishek Pathak and co-written by Pathak, Aamil Keeyan Khan and Parveez Shaikh, released in cinemas on October 2. Devgn returns as Vijay Salgaonkar, with Tabu, Shriya Saran and Ishita Dutta, while Jaideep Ahlawat and Prakash Raj join the ensemble.
Sawant credits Nishikant Kamat with seeing how a relatively small part could carry so much weight. Khan, he says, was so attached to the character that he dressed as Gaitonde for a month and a half during pre-production and left the monitor rather than watch the scene where the inspector is beaten.
Memory and what comes next
One of Sawant’s warmest memories is not from the set of Drishyam but from Khakee. Years later, he says, Devgn approached him in Goa and recalled a specific scene: Sawant running on a track, and being shot. The detail mattered to a self-described “small artist” who does not perform enthusiasm around stars.
- Sawant’s Drishyam: The Conclusion dialogue spread through memes, and audiences cheered his character’s downfall.
- He traces his typecasting to a childhood soldier cut and the public’s assumptions.
- Next is Force 3 with John Abraham, which he has begun shooting.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter India
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