The first time the denizens of Bollywood saw Kay Kay Menon, he was playing Luke, a developmentally challenged sociopath, a wannabe rock-star, the head of a band of boys even less ready to confront the world than he. Bollywood reeled from Anurag Kashyap’s Paanch and when the film went unreleased, it rocked on its heels, nodded its head and went away looking for fresh meat. Kay Kay Menon survived that.

He has also managed the transition between hyper-realities, fitting effortlessly into such diverse films as Reema Kagti’s Honeymoon Travels Private Limited and Milan Luthria’s Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home where he played Sohail, the lame Pakistani jailor with a chip on his shoulder. He did this, he says, by dumping the Method. “There is a way to play realism in Hindi cinema,” he says. “This is how it works for me. In theatre, in a film where you have been cast because you’re an actor, in art-house cinema, you have to dissolve the ego. You do not exist. Your character exists. The lines exist, the way the story is being told exists. You are a peg and the only way to be a great peg is to eliminate the ego. But in a Hindi commercial film, you start by doubling your ego, tripling your ego, increase it any number of times and then you throw yourself into the centre of the universe. The film doesn’t matter, no one else matters, your glares should be reflecting the world away from you and then from that position you try for realism.”

Does he think he has become a success with films like Corporate and Honeymoon Travels? The actor takes a moment. “I don’t understand what success means. It seems to have a calculation behind it. The barometers are in terms of figures. It seems empirical, worldly. It may not even have anything to do with merit. So I’m not sure that it’s something that I worry about.”

But if success meant dancing around trees? “I always say, give me a tree, give me a tune and let me be. In Paanch I was allowed to do what I wanted and I think it worked. In the end Bosco Caesar, the choreographer said to me, ‘I’m going to steal one of those steps.’ I said, ‘Chura lo, yaar’. I will dance around any number of trees; just don’t ask me to do aerobics. In Honeymoon Travels, I had to go wild. At the end, Farah Khan, who was choreographing that song said, ‘Next time item number karna padega’. I said, ‘Definitely karoonga’.”

And if it means acting with pretty faces who throw nothing back at you in a scene? But at the end of the day, it’s also about striving for those truths against non-actors, who throw nothing back at you, who give you nothing with which to work. “There’s a huge misunderstanding about what actors can and cannot do in a film. We are the most visible element of the film so we carry the lion’s share of praise for its success and the same share of vilification for its failure. I don’t think that’s unfair.”

“But you soon begin to realise that you’re part of a huge enterprise, you’re part of a large scheme of things. Anything can go wrong. Lots probably will. You have to do your bit. You have to fit in. And when you’re playing it with people less skilled than you are, you have to be like a classical singer who can come in where they leave you spaces and fill those spaces and improve them. You can’t be like a sugam sangeet singer who can only do a certain amount. I see myself, in the rare moments where I’m working with people less able, as a classical musician, trained to enter and improve the moment. And then it’s like a rising tide, all the boats rise with it and you’ll be amazed what responses you find coming from the supposedly shallow.”