The success of films like Dhurandhar and Animal (2023) has shown that having a dark hero as a protagonist has become the norm in Bollywood. Actor Vijay Varma, who played a grey character in Matka King, opines on the trend saying, "We've always had morally ambiguous protagonists. Maybe except a few performances, the heroes are usually characters suffering from insecurities, lack, or personal pursuit."
Vijay Varma relates to such grey-shaded characters more and feels that telling dark stories may not be a glorification of them. His show Matka King is a story of a man who does betting for a living, but it doesn't glorify the practice. Instead, it invites a conversation and shows the resistance to gambling has been around since the '60s.
Vijay Varma adds, "If you talk about something that has happened in the past, that doesn't mean that you want that to happen again. Showing a torch on something that happened behind us is important because it also shows us that resistance to gambling has been around since the '60s."
