Gurfateh Pirzada Wants the Industry to Stop Chasing ₹100 – ₹200 Crore Formulas (EXCLUSIVE)

For Gurfateh Pirzada, "The Revolutionaries" came with a first he certainly wasn’t expecting — a stunt that went seriously wrong. “I had a first of a stunt gone bad, and pretty bad. I have done stunts before, but I think this was a little extensive to this extent,” he recalls. 

The sequence involved the actor riding a horse with around 20 horses behind him, and the accident could have had far more serious consequences. “I almost died, almost went blind. But luckily that didn’t happen.” Despite the injuries, Pirzada continued shooting. “Over the next two days we shot it,” he says.

But beyond the physical challenges, "The Revolutionaries" also represented an opportunity for Pirzada to push himself creatively. He credits director Nikkhil Advani with taking a chance on younger actors and giving them the opportunity to headline a large-scale project.

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“I think when you are starting out and sort of you are doing your first two to three projects, usually directors, producers make the safe bet,” Pirzada says. “I think we are lucky that Nikkhil sir took this chance with us.”

He adds, “We are all known in certain ways, but we are not huge stars or anything, and to take a chance on younger talent and be like, okay, no, I am not going to take the biggest of the names, but I am going to take these new kids who are doing interesting stuff and put them on this huge spectacle of a show, I think that is a first for me at least.”

For Pirzada, that faith from the team made the experience particularly meaningful. “To be able to do something which has so much riding on it and have complete faith of the team around and not one single iota of doubt that okay maybe he would not be able to do it.”

The actor has also made versatility a priority in his career. “For me it has always been to go up a notch, to do something different than something that was the last character that I played or the last thing that I did.”

He hopes that ‘The Revolutionaries’ will allow him to do exactly that. He says, “I think this will hopefully break a lot of barriers in that sense because there is so much action, there are so many emotions, it hits a different note and I hope it translates and I hope there are bigger and better things that we all do together.”

Pirzada also believes the industry could benefit from moving away from formula-driven storytelling. “I think if I, one thing I could change is most of the things I feel like today are made on the formula first and then around the formula they build a story.”

Instead, he would like filmmakers to prioritize stories over commercial calculations. “I feel like if people start picking stories first and then sort of later on chasing the stereotypes and all those things, that this is going on, so this will make ₹100 crores, this will make ₹200 crores, so I feel like that would be better,” he opines.

Ultimately, he says, audiences can tell when something has genuine feeling behind it. “Because at the end of the day, if we don’t make a story or if we don’t make a film or a show with heart, then everyone who watches it will be able to tell. So I feel like if that can change, it would be commendable,” he concludes.