Kay Kay Menon has taken time out from a hush-hush shoot for a conversation about his latest project. Non-dic clauses prevent the actor from revealing what he is working on next, but given his calibre, it is likely to be noteworthy.
Menon’s new series, Shekhar Home, revolves around matters of the clandestine too. The JioCinema show sees Menon as a Bengali version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world-renowned sleuth Sherlock Holmes.
The Hindi-language comedy is an official re-reimagining of the Holmes stories that are in the public domain. In the fictitious town Lonpur, Shekhar and his associate Jayvrat (Ranvir Shorey) solves minor crimes alongside attempting to foil a major dastardly plot. The cast includes Shernaz Patel, Kaushik Sen, Rasika Dugal, Kirti Kulhari and Rudranil Ghosh.
Shekhar Home turned up quite suddenly on the streaming calendar. Created by Aniruddha Guha and Sriijit Mukherji and directed by Mukherji and Rohan Sippy, the show will be premiered on JioCinema on August 14.
Few actors would resist the opportunity to play the iconic investigator. Yet, Menon briefly hesitated. “I had read Arthur Conan Doyle and I was excited, but I had my apprehensions,” he told Scroll. “What was interesting was the character of Shekhar Home, who is not Sherlock Holmes per se. The script was basic in terms of the plot and Shekhar himself. That gave me the opportunity to bring in the quirks, the eccentricities, the unpredictability.”
The 1990s setting of the six episodes attracted Menon too. “It’s the pre-cellphone era, so the detection becomes that much more interesting, more physical,” he said. “These days, detection means being a computer expert. You sit at a desk and solve everything. Plus, the show gave me the feel of Malgudi Days – a sleepy town where nothing much happens.”
Despite Shekhar’s ancestry, he isn’t a clinical, socially inept detective more keen on clues than people. Rather, Menon’s version of Holmes is eccentric, fun-loving and mischievous.
“I don’t pre-decide a design or a character – I like to play a person and not a role,” Menon explained. “I am not playing a detective, but Shekhar. When you read a script deeply and allow it to ferment, you eventually get the form of the person you are going to play. Then, you search for that form within you, in terms of the psychographic.”
Menon firmly believes that we are, to quote filmmaker Kabir Mohanty from Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, “individually multiple”.
The 57-year-old actor said, “Every human being has within him every other possible human being in this world. Socially, that human being decides to show only a particular part of the spectrum, and that becomes his character.”
Actors have the “facility to portray the entire spectrum” of behaviour, Menon added. “Acting comes from within – the minute I borrow from the market, go shopping, in a sense, it appears contrived and imposed. I try not to do that.”
Menon’s talent for slipping under the skin of diverse characters has been evident all through his career. Born into a Malayali family in Kerala, Menon grew up across Maharashtra.
“My Marathi is better than my Malayalam,” he noted while explaining why he hasn’t been in a Malayalam film yet. “Some Malayali filmmakers approached me and vanished, while I couldn’t make the time for others. In any case, I can’t speak the language fluently and still struggle with my vocabulary.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, Menon was in plays, television shows such as Last Train to Mahakali and Pradhan Mantri, and films, including Naseem and Bhopal Express. The year 2003 should have been watershed time for Menon: he was in Anurag Kashyap’s crime drama Paanch and Sudhir Mishra’s Emergency-themed political drama Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi.
While Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi was released only in 2004, Kashyap’s directorial debut ran into censor problems and still hasn’t seen the light of day. Loosely based on a notorious set of killings in Pune in the 1970s, Paanch revolves around a rock band that falls apart.
Menon played the magnetic singer Luke, who eggs on his bandmates to commit murder and worse. Although Paanch had a few film festival outings and was widely circulated through private screenings, the lack of a theatrical release was an initial setback for Kashyap as well as his actors.
“I call Paanch the most seen and the most unreleased film,” Menon observed. “Paanch was perhaps path-breaking for its time – you didn’t have a protagonist with that kind of hair or look, a rapscallion character, with no redemption. It was also a true film noir, which could have opened doors for many other films of that kind.”
That wasn’t to be. Instead, Menon put the Paanch-sized hole in his career behind him and went from strength to strength. He stood out in multi-starrer films such as Black Friday (2004), Sarkar (2004), Honeymoon Travels Pvt Ltd (2007) and Life in a Metro (2007). Menon also emerged as a reliable antagonist in such films as Shaurya (2008) and Gulaal (2009).
Menon has had his share of scenery-chewing roles too. “One had no choice, but one tried to make it as believable and interesting within that framework,” he pointed out. But in one of the films from this period, the over-the-topness was entirely intentional.
Pankaj Advani’s madcap pastiche Sankat City starred Menon as a car thief who chances upon a stash of money that belongs to a flamboyant gangster. Released in 2009, Sankat City turned out to be Advani’s final film: he died of a cardiac arrest at the age of 45.
Sankat City was consciously designed as a tribute to schlocky Hindi films from the 1980s, with their tacky production values and unbelievable coincidences, Menon said. “Pankaj was unexpectedly crazy, to the extent that we would think, what is he up to?” Menon recalled. “But he was so convincing that when you saw the end result, you would say that this guy was a genius of a different kind.”
While Menon has had noteworthy outings since Sankat City – such as Haider (2014) and The Ghazi Attack (2017), he owes his late-career resurgence to streaming platforms. Between 2020 and 2023, Menon has been excellent in the shows Special Ops, Farzi, Bambai Meri Jaan and The Railway Men. He will reprise his colourful gangster Mansoor from Farzi in the upcoming Citadel spinoff Honey Bunny.
“Streaming requires actors – it’s an individual medium for the audience, unlike cinema,” Menon noted. “You’re watching a show with family members or by yourself, and your brain is put to work. But when you’re watching a film in a theatre, it’s like a party syndrome – even if you don’t know how to dance, because everyone else is dancing, you dance too.”
There is a meritocracy at work in streaming that ups the ante for actors, Menon added. “You need to perform, be good at it and only then can you survive,” he said.
Whether in films or shows, Menon strives to be “as truthful to the moment as possible”. A memorable performance requires bringing out the most authentic self from among a variety of diverse selves, he said.
“No two people are the same, hence each one will be automatically different,” Menon observed. “If I am playing Mahesh the cop and Suresh the cop, I am playing Mahesh and Suresh, not the cop.”
He tries not to get bogged down by the responsibility of playing heavyweight characters or, in the case of Shekhar Home, a pop culture icon who has been interpreted in multiple ways over the decades.
“The text [the script] given to me is the truth – I have to believe that this is the first time I have seen a text like this, that this is my world and my truth,” Menon said. “Only then can I give a role my all, without inhibition. When you are portraying a person, that person should outlive you on the screen.”