As a content creator, Viraj Ghelani may have built a loyal audience, but he admits that transitioning to acting required a different approach. Recently seen in the Gujarati film Mitrata, the 36-year-old says, “I had to do a lot of unlearning for this. Every platform has different mathematics that goes into it.”
Explaining the difference between the two mediums, he shares, “Instagram’s retention rate of an audience is one second. So you have to grab them in that one second. Whereas in a film, you have two hours. You can’t put comedy everywhere. It’s the character that grows on the audience with time. That arc of growth doesn’t happen digitally.”
While Ghelani has played characters in his sketches, portraying one in a feature film has required him to approach comedy differently. Having worked in Govinda Naam Mera and Jhaku, he says, “As a content creator, you are always thinking, ‘What is the next joke? What is the next thing that will make people laugh?’ But in films, you have to understand the character and the story. You have to let the character breathe and grow.”
For Mitrata, which revolves around the friendship between three young men, getting the language right was another part of the process. “The Gujarati spoken in Mumbai is very broken, very Maharashtrian Gujarati. Gujarat’s Gujarati is different,” he says, explaining the effort that went into making his character believable.
While Ghelani is grateful for the audience he has built over the years, he does not take their support for granted. “I would never take my audience for granted. If I have made a wrong choice or wrong content or any film that people didn’t like, I will own up to it. It’s not easy,” he says.
However, he hopes audiences give him the same opportunity to grow as an actor that they have given him as a content creator. “People have seen one side of me through my content. Films give me the opportunity to show them another side. That is exciting because I also want to keep learning and keep experimenting as an actor.”
