Breaking the rage mould: Ali Fazal’s restrained cop anchors Raakh’s unsettling tale of India’s most disturbing killers

Dubai: "I think you've become Bollywood's go-to guy for latent rage roles," I tell Ali Fazal halfway through our conversation.

The actor bursts into laughter.

It's hardly an accusation. If anything, it's an observation born out of interviewing him over the years. While mainstream Hindi cinema continues to reward swaggering heroes who announce their arrival with slow-motion walks, bombastic background music, and gravity-defying action sequences, Fazal has quietly built a career playing men who seem permanently caught between restraint and eruption.

They aren't always the loudest characters on screen, but they're almost always the most emotionally complicated. He doesn't disagree.

"I love getting into the psyche of the common man," he says in an interview with Gulf News.

"And if that is a very frustrated one these days, and if that is what society is turning into, then I will pick those ways to play them out. It's sad that that's what it is. But yeah... why not?"

That philosophy perhaps explains why his hauntingly visceral turn in Raakh, his latest crime drama out on Prime Video, feels less like a departure from Mirzapur and more like the natural evolution of an actor who has steadily resisted being boxed into one successful template.

"It's as far as it gets," Fazal says when I ask him how different this role feels from Guddu Pandit.

"It's been a refreshing change and refreshing feedback. People are really, really loving it and why shouldn't they? I finally saw Raakh myself and I think all the characters, everybody has done really, really well. I'm kind of proud to be part of this."

If anything, Raakh asks him to do the exact opposite of what audiences have come to expect, he adds.

Watching the series, I couldn't help thinking about how difficult it is to play the quietest person in the room. Cinema often rewards actors for explosive monologues. Restraint, on the other hand, can easily be mistaken for doing very little.

Fazal saw it differently.

"I don't keep that in mind when we're performing new parts," he says when I bring up inevitable comparisons with restrained police dramas like Delhi Crime.

"It's also a very different period. I couldn't have had any possible references in modern cinema. A lot of it was written into it, a lot of it I tried to bring to the table myself, and we constructed a very, very interesting, very contrasty character to all the chaos that's happening in the same show."

This isn't a cop who wears authority comfortably. He wears it like armour. At home, his father remains a retired low-ranking constable, forever trying to please his superiors by ladling generous helpings of mutton curry onto their plates and hoping loyalty might one day translate into recognition for his son. His son wants no part of that inheritance. He wants to believe merit can triumph over birth, that hard work can erase class, caste and the indignities that come with both. It's that tension, more than the crime itself, that gives Raakh its emotional pulse.

"I thought there was something very common man-ish about this person," Fazal explains.

"He's basically risen up the ladder on merit, studied his way up into the British system, and then has to battle and sift through the layers of society, the system, identity, everything, and then solve this case. So it's a very, very infused claustrophobia."

Perhaps that's what makes Raakh so unsettling. The gripping series draws inspiration from the 1978 Ranga-Billa case, one of India's most chilling crimes that forever altered how parents viewed their children's safety. The kidnapping and murder of teenage siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra horrified the nation, exposing not just unimaginable brutality but also the immense pressure on investigators racing against time with little more than instinct and old-fashioned police work.

While the series fictionalises names and characters, it borrows heavily from the emotional wreckage left behind by a crime that still lingers in India's collective memory nearly five decades later. Serial killers, played with brutal honesty and quiet menace by Akash Makhija and Ramandeep Yadav, are also the spine of this bone-chilling drama.

"We really tried to map out something unique and interesting. And also with such lovely antagonists on the other side. I mean, Raman and Akash who've given amazing performances. You almost hate them by the end of it, which is so beautiful. As you should," he adds.

When I point out that his character looks capable of violence but constantly chooses restraint, Fazal nods.

"The idea was that this person, by definition, can be... if he decides to hit, he'll probably hurt somebody. But he doesn't. It's because of a lot of other things. It also shows what that claustrophobia can do to the largest of people and almost make you shy to own your own place in society. Then you slowly come into your being as the story progresses."

Playing that kind of emotional chess required something far more demanding than action choreography.

"It was fun. It was interesting. It was a lot of internal dialogue. It was just a lot of awareness of all these things at all times. And of course, the wonderful characters that are there and the actors that I was playing it with... they give you so much."

For an actor who's now equally comfortable moving between Bollywood and Hollywood, you might imagine that confidence comes naturally. It doesn't.

"I think every actor has that nervousness," he admits. "'Will this work?' Because it's always an experiment."

That's partly because Fazal has never seemed interested in repeating himself.

"I also like doing things first for myself. I don't want to get bored. I want to entertain myself. I thought this would be interesting—to see a police officer in this way. I'm sure it can be played a zillion other ways, and that's fine. But we really tried to map out something different here."

The irony is that Mirzapur, the show that catapulted him into pop-culture stardom, could easily have become a creative comfort zone. Instead, he appears determined to keep moving.

"I think I'm pacing it a certain way. But again, we don't set out with a roadmap," he says.

"Sometimes it slows down because my work, my time gets divided between outside work, India work, and then family. I really like spending time with my family."

Fatherhood, it turns out, has complicated that equation.

When I ask whether fathers experience the same guilt that mothers often speak about, his answer comes without hesitation.

"With actors I think it's even worse because it's very uncertain," he says.

He recalls shooting Mirzapur away from home while Richa Chadha was working in Mumbai.

"I was waiting for her to just get some time free and then, with a lot of guilt, I was like, 'Will you come here? Because I can't come there.' She actually made time and then they all landed up on my set. Of course, we cover up for each other and I land up wherever, whenever she's busy. But yeah... that guilt is real. That guilt is real."

It's one of the few moments where the actor disappears completely, replaced by a husband and father trying to make peace with an unpredictable profession.

Working across industries has also given Fazal a unique vantage point on cinema itself.

"They're also evolving," he says of Hollywood and Indian cinema.

"I think all cinema is evolving. The world is getting smaller. Festival films are becoming commercial films and going all the way up to the awards. The lines are getting blurred."

Yet he has no desire to abandon Bollywood's roots.

"Song and dance is also a big part of our identity from India. So I like a nice balance of both kinds of cinema."

Ask him what truly excites him as a viewer, and the answer isn't spectacle.

It's writing.

"The art of screenplay writing is becoming really, really smart," he says. "Good writing is good writing."

He points to F1 as an example.

"The highs and lows are so perfectly etched out that you're sitting in a hall feeling stupid for clapping and hooting because you think it's an actual race... but you do. That's the power of cinema."

He's equally generous when the conversation shifts to critics.

"I respect writers," he says. "It's very difficult to write anything originally."

That respect perhaps explains why he still reads reviews despite spending nearly two decades in the industry.

As our conversation winds down, I ask the inevitable question about bucket lists. Hollywood? A dream role? A grand ambition still waiting to be ticked off?

He smiles.

"There's no bucket list because you don't want to jinx it."

Instead, his ambitions remain surprisingly uncomplicated.

"Just to be able to make good films, I think, and be part of that is the goal. There's so much to tell from this land."