Kamlesh Sawant on playing Inspector Gaitonde in Drishyam, “People felt like hitting me with sandals” : Bollywood News

Kamlesh Sawant is known for his quality performances in Hindi and Marathi movies. His role as Inspector Gaitonde in Drishyam and Drishyam 2 garnered extreme love as well as hatred, albeit in a good way.

Kamlesh Sawant on playing Inspector Gaitonde in Drishyam, “People felt like hitting me with sandals”

Giving insight into the kind of comments he faced, he said in an exclusive video interview with Bollywood Hungama, “There are people who have seen my work before and after Khakee. These are the people who called me after watching Drishyam and praised my work. However, they also questioned my role in the film and asked why I agreed on taking up a negative character as they had so far seen me in positive roles only. To this I simply replied saying that this role came in my fate, so I took it up”.

Continuing the conversation, he further added, “I cannot question what role comes to me. My duty is only to justify any role I get. Gaitonde’s character was meant to receive hatred as it was a negative character. So, the offensive comments that were given to the character were not for me, but (for) Inspector Gaitonde”.

On dealing with blunt statements from people, Kamlesh elaborated, “People used to come up to me and express how they felt like hitting me with sandals, but also did love my work. I used to go blank with such prises as I didn’t know how to react towards it”.

But he got used to it later as can be seen from another incident he recalled. “Even when I was shooting in a village for a Marathi film after Drishyam released, few women came by during the shoot, but refused to get a photo clicked with me,” he said. “The actress of the film even insisted the ladies for the same, but they clearly rejected and left. I was not at all surprised with this kind of reaction from audience as I was already used it.”

Taking this further, Kamlesh shared an incident that took place in late evening right after the release of Drishyam, where he had received a call from random number cursing Inspector Gaitonde. As a reaction to this call, Kamlesh blocked the contact as he felt that the caller had completely engrossed himself within the film and expressed his hatred towards the character of Gaitonde. It seemed fair to him as Gaitonde did attempt brutality on kids and females too which provoked people to hate his character even more.

Kamlesh Sawant did not take any negative comments personally. He rather enjoyed receiving them as it showed how much he had justified the negative character.

Also Read: Drishyam 2 EXCLUSIVE: Kamlesh Sawant reveals he got a lot of hate for playing Inspector Gaitonde: “One night, a man called me aur who mujhe maa-behen ki gaali dene laga; One person commented, ‘Nice performance in the film. Baahar mila toh kutte jaisa maarunga’”