Sep 14, 2026 6:00pm IST
Rasika Dugal on ‘Mirzapur: The Movie’ Ending: ‘I Would Have Played Seasons 2 and 3 Differently’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Rasika Dugal had once said, “It doesn’t end till it ends,” while discussing “Mirzapur: The Movie” with Variety India. Now that the film has arrived, the line has taken on a whole new meaning. The actor, who reprises her role as Beena Tripathi, admits she didn’t anticipate the impact of the film’s ending while shooting the scene.
Speaking about the response to the final scene, Dugal says she was initially more concerned about her own performance than how the moment would eventually land with audiences. “To be honest, I didn’t actually expect this kind of a response to the last scene. In fact, people who had watched the film at the production house had said, ‘This is going to be very impactful.’ I didn’t really pay attention to that as I was preoccupied with whether I had performed well. But the response from the audiences has been amazing,” she says.
Related Stories
For Dugal, the scene with Pankaj Tripathi and Mohitt Maalik also brought back a quote from actor Helen Mirren, who once spoke about judging a role’s impact by reading a script backward. At the time, Dugal admits she didn’t fully understand what Mirren meant. Her experience with “Mirzapur: The Movie,” however, helped put that thought into perspective. She quips, “I think that I’ve understood the impact of this now. Mirren had emphasized that if you’re present in the last two to three pages of a film, it means the role is really impactful. I’m able to put that in context now.”
Dugal believes the song “Sanson Ki Mala,” the writing and the final scene come together to elevate the moment. “It makes the moment poetic. Vaibhav Pani and Madhur Sharma have done a great job with the qawwali,” she says.
The ending also raises an interesting question about Beena Tripathi’s journey across the “Mirzapur” franchise. Having now discovered more about her character’s life and knowing where her story eventually lands, would Dugal have approached some of her scenes in the series differently? Her answer is an emphatic yes.
She explains, “To be honest, we didn’t have this all charted out when we started filming Seasons 2 and 3. There was a rough backstory discussed, but not with this detail and this ending. So, yes, I would have played the scenes differently if I had known this earlier. If I had complete knowledge, it would have affected my performance in seasons two and three.”
However, Dugal points out that this is also one of the challenges of acting in a long-running series, particularly one that is not always shot chronologically. An actor can sometimes discover aspects of a character much later than the point at which those scenes were actually filmed, changing the way they might have approached earlier moments in retrospect.
Popular on Variety
She also discusses one of the memorable lines from the film’s final stretch: “Love hi toh hai, lifetime thodi hi rahta hai.” (It’s only love, does it really stay for a lifetime?) When asked if she believes in the dialogue, Dugal admits, “I believe kuch bhi lifetime nahi rahta hai. Love bhi nahi.” (I believe nothing stays for a lifetime, not even love.) “And that is the beauty about living. Things change constantly and you’re expected to adapt to it. You discover new things every day and there’s a grief of losing what you had, but there’s a beauty of finding something new.”
Comments are moderated. They may be edited for clarity and reprinting in whole or in part in Variety publications.