Sunil Grover, Ashish Vidyarthi on Breaking Stereotypes of Comedian and Villain Thanks to OTT

In a career spanning three decades, Ashish Vidyarthi has starred in over 300 films, across languages like Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bengali. Some of his most prominent roles have been negative, establishing the actor has a brilliant villain onscreen. The actor’s most recent project is the ZEE5 web series Sunflower, a murder mystery set in a Mumbai society. His character of a prejudiced, judgmental man leads to subtle comic moments. Ashish says it was refreshing for him to try out a different role, one in which he wasn’t doing the murdering, for a change.

“I couldn’t believe that they had offered me this role. It was not something that I had done before. Over a period of time, what happens is when you when you keep doing similar roles, forget about the directors, casting directors and writers, you yourself start believing that that’s the only thing that you can do. So it felt good that they thought of me as somebody with a funny bone. A hidden funny bone, but a funny bone nonetheless. So I really enjoyed playing Mr Iyer,” the 58-year-old actor says.

His co-star in Sunflower, Sunil Grover agrees that OTT platforms have given him the opportunity to showcase his talent beyond comedy. Sunil is best known for his comic roles like Gutthi and Dr Mashoor Gulati in TV shows. However, the actor says he trained in tragic roles in drama school.

“It feels great to experience different kind of characters because of OTT. While I started doing comedy – which I really thoroughly enjoy each time that I do, and I’m very blessed that I’m able to connect with people through this medium – but in drama school I did mostly tragedies. So, I used to wonder all the tragic plays that I did – Hamlet, The Caucasian Chalk Circle – all the training I had in how to get into the character, when will all that be used? But thankfully, those opportunities have naturally come to me,” he says.