Silence was the performance in Kennedy: Aamir Dalvi

Aamir Dalvi says working on Kennedy meant unlearning everything he knew about performance under director Anurag Kashyap. “Anurag never wanted anything loud or dramatic from me. At first, it’s unsettling because as actors we’re trained to fill silence… Here, he was asking me to trust it,” Aamir says. He recalls how the director rarely over-explained scenes. “Sometimes he’d just watch and say very little… With sir you slowly realise he wants the character to exist, not perform.”

That approach shaped his character, Salim Kattawala, into a quiet but unsettling presence. “When you stop performing and allow stillness to take over, the character begins to breathe on its own. That’s when it becomes dangerous, because it feels disturbingly real.” Though this marks his first Bollywood antagonist role, Aamir says Kashyap never spoke in terms of good or bad. “He only spoke about honesty… if I’m going to be remembered for this, it has to be honest, even the ugly parts.”

The impact lingered beyond the shoot. “There were days later when I was feeling heavy and unsettled… That’s when I realised the character had entered me quietly, the same way he enters the film.” He adds, “If a character leaves me disturbed and unfinished, I know something has been done right.”












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