The ‘Accidental’ Alchemist: Unravelling Sukant Goel’s journey
From chemical engineering to the spotlight, discover how Sukant Goel traded formulas for the stage to become one of Indian cinema’s most authentic, selfless performers.
When I sat down to speak with Sukant Goel, I wasn’t just looking for the story of a Chemical Engineer-turned-actor. I wanted to understand the why. How does a boy from Muzaffarnagar, educated at the elite Welham Boys’ and Doon School, navigate a persistent sense of “being less”, reducing his ambition to a “it’s a false thought” and “a false idea” to eventually finding his voice and feet on the stage and Indian cinema?
What emerged is a fascinating study in what Sukant calls “misguided ambition” that transformed through the fires of theatre, into a rigorous, selfless devotion to his craft, across mediums of theatre, web series and film. Sukant’s body of work includes Vasan Bala’s Monica O My Darling (alongside Rajkummar Rao, Huma Qureshi and Radhika Apte); Ananyabrata Chakraborty’s Kaisi Yeh Paheli (with Rajit Kapur and Sadhana Singh which has won the Best Director Award at the New York Indian Film Festival); Sameer Saxena and Amit Golani’s Kaala Paani co-starring Mona Singh and Ashutosh Gowarikar; Anubhuti Kashyap’s Accused (starring Konkana Sen Sharma and which has just released on Netflix); Anurag Kashyap’s Dobaara co-starring Tapsee Pannu and Rahul Bhat; Kennedy (currently on Netflix starring Bhat again) and the upcoming crime drama Bandar starring Bobby Deol (India’s theatrical release is slated for May 22. Bandar premiered at TIFF 2025). In a short span of 15 years, Sukant is a performer to reckon with today.
His academic journey though, was a series of tactical decisions rather than passionate pursuits. Sukant admits with refreshing candour that he “managed” his way through school without studying much. Chemistry was simply the only science he did enjoy, leading him to a seat at NIT, Jaipur. But Jaipur felt too small for a spirit craving the scale of a “big city.”
He landed in Mumbai at Institute of Chemical Technology but brought with him the baggage of insecurity. In the elite corridors of his boarding schools, he had been acutely aware of the brands he didn’t sport, cameras and watches that were aspirational and the countries he could not visit then. “I was very aware as a child that I am less,” he shares. That interiority, perhaps, is what makes him such a keen observer of the human condition – which is what his pursuit in theatre and cinema demands of him today.
The transition from engineer to actor wasn’t a sudden epiphany; it was a slow burn fuelled by mimicry and compliments. Sukant originally viewed theatre as a mere training ground.
“Around 2006-7 while still in college, I started taking my friends seriously when they said, that ‘you should be an actor.’ Also, Bombay (Mumbai now) just felt physically closer – you think it can happen. Perhaps if I was in Delhi I might not have seen the possibility. Although I don’t know what was the reality that showed me such a possibility…
“There’s nothing I did for it,” he shares with a bemused laugh. “I didn’t once go to Prithvi Theatre and watch a play. All those four years, I went all around Bombay but never to Prithvi… We just thought that what we see in popular Hindi cinema is acting and that’s as best you can get, and maybe would say that these actors are good actors.
“And these narratives are built around… a few names like Naseer, Om Puri. It’s okay if people think we are not as good looking as Saif Ali Khan, just look at Naseer and Om Puri and you will become a good actor. And you start thinking that yeah, I can be a good actor in cinema. You think of theatre as a stepping stone to cinema, and that’s how you enter and then it shatters!”
But then, he met Satyadev Dubey – the late doyen of Indian theatre and parallel cinema. This was soon after Sukant had told his father that he wanted to pursue acting as a career. “I thought that I had to do theatre but I didn’t see theatre as an independent thing – complete in itself which didn’t require the validation of cinema.
“I thought that I was going to be picked up from there as a prodigy and be thrust into cinemascope and going to be declared a Star. So, I was looking out for which group I can join… and somebody suggested Nadira Babbar’s group Ekjute.
“I’d gone for that and on the way I don’t know why – instead of getting down at Andheri I got down at Vile Parle and went to Prithvi. And I met this person whom I knew through my office and who was rehearsing for a play… which she was doing with Satyadev Dubey.
She asked me, “What do you want to do?”
I said, “Theatre. I have some money and I am going to join Ekjute.”
And she went, “Why don’t you do a workshop with Satyadev Dubey? It’s starting tomorrow.” I was like, “Who’s Dubey?”
She told me, “He’s sitting here, I will make you meet him. Just don’t ask him anything. Don’t say anything more than answering his questions. It’s a two-day workshop.” And that’s where it all started.
“I was with him for a couple of years. In fact, we were only three of us in his workshop that year. Previously his workshops were always free and there would be people from all sorts of backgrounds in those workshops. This time he took money from us. He took 20,000 bucks from each of us, saying I am taking this because I’m making a film. And then he said, ‘take this passage, learn it, repeat it 200 times with every full stop, every comma, and come prepared tomorrow. Or otherwise don’t come. I went in the next morning and we just started working on the exercises and a lot of it would be talking or lying down and listening. But I felt like I had a peg to hang myself on.”
The vibrant, tightly-knit theatre culture at Prithvi between 2009 and 2015 was that of a supportive community. Compared to today’s more commercialized environment, Sukant found the atmosphere very “permeable and fertile” to offer his skills as an actor and artist. Couple that with the rise of original Hindi plays in the presence of performers and directors such as Manav Kaul, Sunil Shanbag and Purva Naresh, and the fading of “traditional hierarchies,” actors and playwrights found themselves enriched and encouraged to create original works.
From this atmosphere emerged Sukant’s notable works on stage such as Waiting for Naseer, written and directed by Sapan Saran (founder of Tamasha Theatre and known for her original Hindi writings) where he is one of the two leads. Created in the style of Theatre of the Absurd, Waiting… features two actors who find themselves in a space between after death and before becoming souls. So they are “trapped and as in Absurd Theatre, they have a circumstance they can’t get out of, and they are both waiting to watch Naseer’s play while hanging around in Prithvi Café. But there is only one ticket. Now, these two are fighting about who’s an actor, what is acting, and they go into concepts. The younger boy (played by Sukant) says he’s a writer but ultimately, he has to confess he is an actor. They discuss how he died and how the other one died. There are stories – of theatre, of Bombay, they have a quiz on Naseer – the script goes all over the place. And then there is the quintessential waiter, who is an aspirational actor too, but he waits at Prithvi Café and writes poetry and… terrible poetry,” says the actor.
Waiting… revolves around the idea of waiting and being there, and what you do with that moment. All the elements of Absurdism – the nothingness, existentialism, meaninglessness where you have to carry your burden are there, “but” explains Sukant, “it’s not preachy. It’s a funny piece, very intelligently written. I was very impressed because you don’t see a lot of Absurdism in modern Hindi writing.”
While on the subject of Theatre of the Absurd, Sukant shares that he has acted and directed in The Lesson by Eugene Ionesco. “We stopped it for a while because I just couldn’t run the play but last year I woke up and we are back to doing lots of shows now. Although Atul Kumar was cast in it originally, he stopped doing it for some reasons, so I stepped in.”
Atul Kumar, the founder of Company Theatre and a veteran on the Mumbai stage is currently to be seen in Ronald Harwood’s 1995 play Taking Sides, which Kumar has directed as well. It played to nearly a full house at Prithvi in the last week of February and sees Sukant play Major Arnold to Kumar’s Wilhelm Furtwangler. Set in post WWII Germany and against the backdrop of denazification investigation by US authorities, Taking Sides is a true story about Furtwangler – a well-known German music composer of his time, who had helped many Jews escape. However, in the post war scenario, this support is turned on its head by the American investigating officer Major Arnold who insists that Furtwangler was not punished by Adolf Hitler’s regime because he “had friends in high places.”
Taking Sides belongs as much to its protagonist as its antagonist. With both sides standing firm on their arguments, the audience is left to decide who is right and who isn’t. It is a powerful comment on today’s polarised world which is ably captured by Harwood and brilliantly portrayed in Kumar’s direction. Sukant as Major Arnold steals the show with his thunderous, if unnerving performance with Kumar’s calm disposition as Furtwangler acting as the perfect foil to him.
Arnold, tortured and sleepless, by the horrific scenes of the concentration camps that he has witnessed, is determined to pin the blame on someone – anyone – in his bid to nail Adolf’s men. His attempts are frustrated each time but he refuses to give up or see reason, even though you (as the audience) urge him to. If you think Sukant makes for a good villain onscreen, here is a performance that needs witnessing first hand to realise the stage presence he commands live. His real diminutive self is forgotten as he owns the stage completely and stands head and shoulders above all the others.
“I love being a part of that play,” he shares with a smile. “As I started doing more and more theatre and I think somewhere around the time when I started working with Sunil Shanbag in 2014, my mind really opened up to idea of performance. How to understand a script, how to read a script, and then understand what needs to be done to bring it out. The actor’s job is to look at a scene from different perspectives, looking from the co-actor perspective, their lines, or what is the other actor doing.”
Sukant’s journey as a director has been defined by his evolution from a “micro-directing” style – where he demanded that actors manifest his exact internal vision – to a more collaborative and trusting approach. Influenced by the mentorship of Shanbag, who advised him to “lower your stakes” because an actor can only give so much at any given time, Sukant realized that his previous rigid control hindered the creative process.
By listening to feedback from actors and relaxing his rules, particularly during his work on the play The Lesson he has learned to value the unique contributions of his performers. Ultimately, Sukant has successfully moved away from placing “puppets of myself on stage,” choosing instead to trust the individual skills of his actors to create more effective performances.
“Slowly I’ve adapted. Some actors have come and said, ‘Sukant you give too many directions.’ I listen to them now. Initially, there was resistance. I used to do it and I never questioned it and that’s the way it was. I believed my passion is the only way. But slowly I figured that that’s not the best way and my rules have become more relaxed. The Lesson has become my lesson, and actors have come back saying that ‘it’s better rehearsing with you.’ I feel good, validated.”
As I listened to him, I realized that Sukant is constantly reverse-engineering his performances. Whether he is acting in a big-budget series like Kaala Paani or directing Ionesco’s The Lesson, he is always observing. He keeps his director’s mind observant of the actor’s work but has learned the grace of letting go.
That is the mark of a true artist. Sukant has moved from a place of feeling “less” to a place where he can hold space for others, creating a mosaic of life where the ego is secondary to the truth of the script. Sukant Goel is a reminder that sometimes, getting ‘rejected’ by your initial plans is the only way to find where you truly belong.
What's Your Reaction?
