Irrfan Death Anniversary: Remembering an Exemplary Actor of Little Words

Irrfan would understand his characters in a way that made it difficult to separate the actor from the role.

I first read ‘The Lowland’ by Jhumpa Lahiri at too young an age to comprehend the meaning behind the text, but something about the form stood out to me. Having decided that I would have to continue to resign myself to Enid Blyton for a few more years, I decided to turn to film.

This brought me to The Namesake and to two of my favourite actors of all time – Tabu and Irrfan. 

There’s something mesmerising about Irrfan’s act in The Namesake. The way the actor employs body language is unlike any other. In Mira Nair’s film, he ages through little details in his demeanour – a limp, a bent back, and a more reserved stance.

When Irrfan’s character Ashoke Ganguli meets Tabu’s Ashima for the first time, he is bashful and it only comes across in the way his eyes dart to and away from her.

Words would fall short to explain the magic Irrfan and Tabu created on screen in the film. 

This has been said before but deserves repeating – Irrfan is an actor of silence, his eyes perform. In Billu, he silently watches everyone he knows and loves slowly lose faith in him. He claims that he is friends with a huge star (played by Shah Rukh Khan) but nobody believes him and yet, he never offers a rebuttal. 

This is a trait he brings into his swansong The Song of Scorpions as well.

His character Aadam is meant to be seen as the ‘male saviour’ and the nice guy and yet, something sinister and malicious lies lurking in the shadows of his character work.

This is all evident from the way he looks at the characters he interacts with and especially in the way his form changes around the woman he claims to love, Nooran. 

But it isn’t surprising that the actor managed to fill a morally gray character with the right amount of duplicity because he has a way with such roles. In the Indian retelling of Macbeth, Maqbool, Irrfan manages to showcase human psychology in a way only the actor could’ve. As a man who is haunted by the consequences of his actions even as he is acting them out, the actor is inimitable. 

Of course, Maqbool’s success also rests on the able shoulders of Tabu’s expert portrayal of Nimmi (or Lady Macbeth) and Vishal Bhardwaj’s craft and vision. Also who can forget the performances by Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, and Piyush Mishra?

At the end of the day, Irrfan understood his characters – so well in fact that it was often tough to separate him from the roles. He wasn’t ever Irrfan on screen, he is Ashoke, Aadam, Saajan Fernandes, and Champak Bansal. 

Even in a film like Piku, Irrfan plays a comparatively minor role. But the film is an example of how well the actor performs in ensemble casts. He would never need monologues or extended scenes to convey the emotions his role meant to. Even in Piku, which is arguably one of Deepika Padukone’s best performances, Irrfan isn’t easy to ignore. 

Maybe that’s the best way to describe Irrfan, an actor who wasn’t easy to ignore. He wasn’t a ‘superstar’ in the most common sense of the word but he was an artist. Like he said himself, "The day I become conventional, something inside me will die."

From playing morally gray characters to caring fathers and mentors, Irrfan was an actor of silence which especially makes sense because even as an actor he’d let his craft speak.