‘Srikant Tiwari is like RK Laxman’s Common Man’: Manoj Bajpayee on his role in ‘The Family Man 2’

The actor on reprising his role as a middle-aged agent in The Family Man 2, giving his 200% to every role, and hobnobbing with Tamil cinema’s who’s who

Manoj Bajpayee is shooting for a new project atop a hill in Uttarakhand. The internet connection is inconsistent. “I miss the personal touch,” he says, slightly vexed that all interactions have gone online since the pandemic. But even on a patchy Zoom call, his excitement is apparent. The second season of The Family Man, in which he reprises the role of Srikant Tiwari, the middle-aged spy dealing with middle-class problems and midlife crisis, released on June 4. And there has been a torrent of feedback. “It is quite overwhelming,” he says. “Though the first season was well received, it took time for people to watch the series and for it to spread through word of mouth. The second one just took off from the first hour of its release. People are binge-watching it; hundreds of people I know are watching it for the second or even third time.” The anticipation, after all, was enormous. Season one had ended on a cliffhanger. But there was the question of whether the second season would match or surpass the storytelling of the first.