Veteran actor Mithun Chakraborty is set to appear in his third collaboration with filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri in the highly anticipated film The Bengal Files, which is scheduled to release this Friday, September 5. In a recent interview, Chakraborty shared insights into his unique working relationship with Agnihotri, noting that the director often creates characters specifically for him.
”Vivek Agnihotri writes challenging characters for me,” Chakraborty said. “We get along very well. He understands me very well as an actor.” The actor revealed his initial hesitation about taking on his role in The Bengal Files, where he plays a partially mute elderly man who is a victim of the 1946 Great Calcutta Killings. “I told him I won’t be able to do the character because it’s too challenging,” he explained, citing the character’s inability to speak properly and his unusual habits. “It took us a while to even figure out how he’d speak.”
When asked about the “hard-hitting” and “propaganda” labels often associated with Agnihotri’s films, Chakraborty agreed with the former, stating, “The film which tells the truth has to be hard-hitting,” but firmly dismissed the latter.
Chakraborty, who is a member of the Bhartiya Janata Party, also criticized the Mamata Banerjee-led West Bengal government for allegedly obstructing the film’s trailer launch, which was planned at a luxury hotel in Kolkata. “It was a planned conspiracy,” he claimed, adding, “If you haven’t even watched the trailer, how can you stop the trailer launch event?”
Anupam Kher, another regular in Agnihotri’s films, will portray Mahatma Gandhi in The Bengal Files. While that wasn’t a role on Chakraborty’s personal wish list, he revealed he is in talks to play late spiritual leader Rajneesh Osho and expressed a personal desire to portray revolutionary Che Guevara on screen.
Looking ahead, Chakraborty has several other projects lined up, including Rajkumar Santoshi’s period drama Lahore 1947, and the Telugu film Fauji with Prabhas. He will also star in Rajinikanth’s Jailer 2 and the Bengali film Projapoti 2. “I do all kinds of films,” he said. “Just that I do only the films in which my character excites me, otherwise I don’t do it.”