Fire & Ice
He was rejected thrice by the National School of Drama. And maybe the rejection comes through on screen: Manoj Bajpai is full of fury and raw energy. From next to nothing, it's made him into a household name, a former theatre actor from Delhi who is trying to make Mumbai his with the help of Bhiku Mhatre, the imploding urban thug in Satya that made him a star.

After bit parts in big- ticket films-Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen, Govind Nihalani's Drohkaal, Mahesh Bhatt's Dastak-he chanced on Ram Gopal Varma, and Satya. Varma found an actor he could experiment with, someone who could stay cool or go ballistic with fine-tuned energy. "He doesn't act," says Varma. "He becomes the character." There's a lot, and all varied. Post Shool, a Varma thriller about an indignant policeman, he plays a cross-dressing dancer; there's a project based on Doestoevsky's The Idiot; and Shyam Benegal's Zubeida, where he plays a prince in the India of the fifties. "I always look for scripts that allow me to explore," Bajpai says. He's found them. They've found him.