Neeraj Pandey: With Hasmukh I have tried to explore a dark side of my personality

For writers, it is important to adapt to different genres of writing, be it a massy comedy, an indie drama or anything in the middle. Neeraj Pandey, who has written the dialogues for the upcoming Netflix dark comedy Hasmukh, had a rather interesting approach towards it considering he has not attempted a similar genre before.

Neeraj, who has dabbled quite a bit in poetry explains just how he cracked writing dialogues for a crime-soaked web series like Hasmukh. He shares, “It’s true that I have not attempted something like Hasmukh before. People know me for writing poems. But with Hasmukh, I have tried to explore a side of myself that is a little dark through the characters in the show.”

Hasmukh features an ensemble cast comprising of Vir Das, Ranvir Shorey, Ravi Kishan, Manoj Pahwa and Raza Murad. So, was there any pressure on him to write dialogues for such acclaimed actors? “Not really. It was fun instead,” he replies as he describes his writing process. He says, “I knew Ravi Kishen, Ranvir Shorey and Manoj Pahwa were going to be in the show. What I did was that I synced the characters in the story with the image that I had of these wonderful actors in my mind. This is how I created different voices for different characters in my head, and I caught these characters and wrote for them. When I presented them in the writer’s room, they liked them. So that was my process.”

So, which was the character he had the most fun writing for? “I loved writing dialogues for Ranvir Shorey’s character Jimmy. He is multi-dimensional and has reflections of me, too. He has parts of me that are not that clean. So, it was actually a release for me. So, it was a very selfish project in a way.”

Hasmukh will release on Netflix on APRIL, 17th 2020.