Kay Kay Menon reveals his ‘escapist way’ of dealing with tough roles

Kay Kay Menon is solid as ever essaying a complex role in the segment Bahrupiya of the anthology series Ray. The episode is based on late legend Satyajit Ray’s short story in Bangla titled Bahurupi, or the impressionist, and comes laden with an element of fantasy. The actor decodes how he faced the challenge of essaying a brutally realistic role that treads into the domain of make-belief.

“I have an easy way that can also be called the escapist way. I look at a story as a story. I remove the baggage. I look at it as (director) Srijit (Mukherji)’s interpretation of the story and that’s the newspaper headline for me,” Kay Kay says.

The story casts the actor as a timid make-up artist named Indrashish Saha, who inherits a strange book on prosthetic expertise when his grandmother passes away, along with a substantial amount of money. Reality and fantasy fuse in the storyline, and Indrashish is sucked into a vortex of doom as he begins to imagine he is invincible and starts abusing his newfound ‘power’ to ‘become’ anybody he wishes.

The 54-year-old actor addresses the element of make-belief about the story saying: “Even in a newspaper, you often see headlines that are unimaginable, right? You believe it because it is in the newspaper. Similarly, for me, the story becomes factual at that point of time.” — IANS