Amar Upadhyay: TV gives me grounds to experiment, but there is a certain limit to it

Though actor Amar Upadhyay is busy exploring other avenues including production of his ongoing daily soap, his first love remains acting, that too for the big screen.

“TV gives me ground to experiment, but there is a certain limit to it,” he continues, “That’s because television has a certain kind of audience, and when you try to go all out and give them something different every few days, they may not like it. Even the channel is scared of experimenting and losing the time slot. They believe if audiences are liking certain kinds of emotions, it may be a risk to experiment with it a lot.”

But that becomes tiring for an artiste. “For me to remain motivated to work, it’s important to experiment with the characters I play, and films offer me that. In fact, this urge to work in films come from this very fact that cinema offers me good, interesting and versatile roles,” says the actor, adding, “Though I will always be thankful to television, I believe, now is the time for me to experiment and work in good movies.”

Upadhyay points out how cinema is fearless and more open to risks. Giving examples of projects that had out-of-the-box ideas and managed to do wonders at the box office, he adds, “Can you imagine a film like Toilet…Ek Prem Katha or Padman, with a subject as bizarre as sanitary needs to work in Bollywood. I don’t think one could have even imagined a film like this 25 years ago. This is the perfect example of how the industry is willing to experiment. And that’s why actors like me want to go out there and challenge myself. It’s not about proving anyone else what all I can do, but doing work that satisfies the artiste in me. After all, we actors want to be creatively satisfied at the end of the day.”

Upadhyay, who was last seen playing a comic role in Bhool Bhulaiyya 2 (2022), is happy to be alive in this age of cinema and getting to work on some of the best scripts. “After Bhool Bhulaiyya 2, so many people told me that there should have been more scenes of you. They liked my work. And I enjoyed playing that character. It was a breath of fresh air for me,” he wraps up.