Meet Suparn Varma, the filmmaker giving the villain his due

In Suparn Varma’s shows, people are rarely just good or evil. As the lines blur, characters get complicated, more compelling. And he creates hit after hit

Suparn Varma doesn’t enjoy creating heroes. He’d rather create a flawed, more realistic character who doesn’t always go by the book, who is wracked by the same pangs of guilt that a fallen angel would. “I don’t see life in binary terms such as good and evil,” says the 40-year-old director and screenwriter. “It comes down to choices. Sometimes you make choices for yourself, which may be unfair to others; sometimes you make choices for others that are unfair to you. That’s how we live life. It’s a series of choices that we keep making.”

Those choices, and Varma’s preoccupation with good and evil, are what drive Rana Daggubatti in Rana Naidu and Samantha Prabhu in The Family Man. Varma wrote and directed The Family Man (2021-), he was also creative director on Rana Naidu (2023) and directed Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai (2023). His new show, The Trial, an adaptation of the American courtroom drama, The Good Wife, stars Kajol and Jisshu Sengupta, and is streaming on Disney+ Hotstar. Next up is Lootere, a Hansal Mehta show about an Indian ship hijacked in Somalian waters. In the works are an as-yet-untitled show and other projects that should keep him busy for the next couple of years.

Varma has directed The Trial (2023), creatively directed Rana Naidu (2023), directed Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai (2023) and written and directed The Family Man (2021-). None of the characters he writes or directs are fully good or evil.

Mumbai resident Varma started out as a journalist with Rediff. But he says being a writer and director was always his goal. “My journey has been filled with a lot of failures,” says Varma. First there was Janasheen (2003) that was panned by critics and audiences. Acid Factory (2009) a remake of the 2006 Hollywood thriller Unknown, about characters who wake up with temporary memory loss in a sealed acid factory, impressed critics but didn’t perform too well at the box office. Then there was X: Past is Present, a 2015 Indian collaborative feature film directed by a team of 11 filmmakers. It opened to mixed reviews. “I’ve realised one thing, that the best lessons in life are taught when one falls. The mindset in the industry used to be, if a writer turns director he won’t write for other people, so the well of work dries up,” Varma says. It’s what propelled him to write the kinds of characters he truly wanted to, the kind drawn from real life, who weren’t purely good or evil.

Past perfect

Varma’s interest in complicated villains goes back to 2015, when he worked on Darr Sabko Lagta Hai, a horror fiction anthology series starring Bipasha Basu and created by Raj & DK. It featured ghosts, zombies, phantoms, possessed objects, witches and wizards. In 2018, he directed Kaushiki, (streaming on Voot), a show about a group of friends, each depraved, rotten and hiding devastating secrets. He also wrote the 2020 Netflix series, Hasmukh about a shy, small-town comedian who realises that committing murder is the only way to keep his stand-up comedy funny. The show starred Vir Das and Ranvir Shorey.

But he credits the pandemic for giving audiences an appetite for unusual stories. “Covid brought us to a very interesting stage,” he says. “It developed the market, matured the audiences and exposed them to so much stuff in those two years.” That was when he knew that his moment had come. “I could write the kind of characters I wanted. In Rana Naidu, every character is hard to box into any one category of good or evil,” says Varma. “With even lead actors now playing villains, there’s so much more to do with a bad guy.”

The Trial is an adaptation of the American courtroom drama The Good Wife, starring Kajol as a housewife who returns to work at a law firm, 13 years after leaving, to support her family after her husband is imprisoned.

Varma says a good antagonist needs only one key ingredient: They must always have a great back story. in Family man, Season 2, Samantha Akkineni has one that’s hard to beat. She plays a Sri Lankan Tamil liberation fighter. “Some people see her as a villain, some people see her as a martyr or hero or revolutionary.”

The trick, as Varma knows only too well, is to give audiences what they want. “We try to weave in a happy ending so that they go home happy, thinking that the world is fine.”

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS

Suparn Varma lists his favourite villains

Peter Lorre. He played villains of all kinds, such as Raskolnikov in Crime & Punishment (1935), and Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and always brought a sense of humour, wickedness and simplicity and sadness to each role. For me, he was one of the greatest actors to ever play a villain.

Jayant (Zakaria Khan). Amjad Khan’s father is one of the greatest actors of our time. He brought in humour and was just brilliant. Watch him as Shankar in Amar (1954).

Rehman (Said Rehman Khan): Such a polished guy. Take Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (1962) or his role as Mr Ghosh in Pyaasa (1957).

Daggubatti Venkatesh. In Rana Naidu, he’s a hero playing a villain. Such a naughty guy.