Anshumaan Pushkar’s screen characters may exude intensity and silence, but off-screen, he’s refreshingly open, often goofy, and endlessly curious. In this honest conversation, he reflects on finding his rhythm—from the small-town chaos of Mokama to monologues that moved the nation.
“I wasn't the first choice—but I became the right one.”
Anshumaan speaks like someone who knows exactly where he came from, what it took to get here, and why the work—not the noise around it—matters. No performance, no myth-making. Just an actor who started from nowhere, reflected from his past, and built a career by paying attention. To craft. To people. To the stillness in between.
From a small town in Bihar, Ashumaan knew he was meant for greater things. He expresses that “The urge to express was always there. I wasn’t a quiet kid—I danced, I performed, I mimicked everyone.” There was no road-map, no exposure, no acting school. What’s astonishing is that nothing about his journey was designed for the life he has now. It was all instinct, all self-taught. And somehow, that’s what makes it all work.
As a child, Anshumaan was driven by a restless need to express. He would dance at weddings, mimic actors, and even imitate his school teachers just to entertain those around him. “I used to lock myself in my room and copy Hrithik Roshan or Govinda,” he recalls. His mother would watch from the doorway, often laughing, sometimes amused, sometimes surprised—but never dismissive. “She saw it as silly, maybe even strange, but she never stopped me,” he says.
Without formal training or a clear path, he built his early discipline alone—practising monologues during lockdowns, experimenting with gestures and voices, rehearsing in private, like it meant everything. And in many ways, it did. That early, obsessive dedication is what carried him to the sets he stands on today.
He describes that coming from a small town, the film industry seems like a fantasy world. Anshuman was following the script everyone around him expected—“study, job, settle down”, this did not stop the spark inside him. Conveniently, when the time to choose where to do his MBA came, he picked Mumbai—not for the degree, but for proximity, at the Ekjute Theatre Group. He says, “Cinema was the only reason I chose Mumbai. I wanted to be near the industry, even if I wasn’t in it yet.”
With great resilience Anshumaan sprinted towards his dreams, he expresses that “this was the moment I said to myself—enough of waiting on the sidelines. The stage is there. Now you have to be there. Somehow, anyhow.”
His first major break came with Jamtara, a project he auditioned for in 2017. “I felt like this was the kind of character I wanted to do. It felt right,” he says. But the process wasn’t immediate—shooting didn’t begin until 2018, and the release took even longer. “There was a one-and-a-half-year wait after we finished shooting. That confusion, that silence—it was real.”
During that gap, he held on to one thing: theatre. “Theatre never let me feel useless,” he says. “Even when nothing else was happening, getting recognized on stage, even by ten people, was enough to keep going.” His passion for the stagecraft just grew stronger no matter the hindrances.
The storms Ashumaan weathered strengthened not only his resilience, but also his instincts as an actor. He explains “I like to experience the emotion of a character rather than just map it out intellectually.” He doesn’t separate technique from emotion—he blends them. “You mix your own soul into the words written on paper,” he says, “and somewhere in that process, the performance becomes real.”
Anshumaan’s effort as an actor is to embody the soul of every character he plays. He reflects on what a director once advised him, “You’re pretending to feel it, but when you actually feel it, there’ll be no difference between you and the character.” That’s the standard he holds himself to now—an internal honesty that can’t be faked, and shouldn’t be.
It’s this depth of commitment to performance that often blurs the line between actor and character—so much so that people assume he’s exactly like the roles he plays. He mentions that the audience often pictures him in reference to his characters, broody, serious, and intense, however on the contrary he is the complete opposite. Anshumaan admits that “In reality, I’m fun-loving, adventurous… sometimes even goofy.”
He recalls that his work in Moonwalk gave him the chance to do something entirely different. It gave him a space to express his true self. The character was lighter, more playful, and far from what audiences expected of him. “It was a shift,” he says, “but I relied on instinct, leaned into the rhythm of it.” With little prep time, he improvised freely, found humour in the moment, and surprised even himself. “That set taught me you don’t always need control—sometimes, you just need presence.”
That ability to stay present—to read a room, adapt, and react without overthinking—comes from a habit he’s had since childhood. “Observation is my biggest tool now,” he says. Whether it was mimicking teachers or studying how someone walked or spoke, he was always absorbing. “Earlier, it was imitation for fun. Now, it’s about understanding emotion. That’s what helps me build truth into a character.”
He didn’t have legacy, training, or access—just sharp observation, relentless patience, and a belief that even a boy from Mokama could belong in cinema. Everything he knows, he’s learned by doing: watching actors with reverence, listening to directors like a student, and trusting the rhythm of his own instinct. “I don’t know how it became reality,” he says, thinking back to the boy who once danced in a locked room while his mother smiled at the door. “But I think he’d be proud.” And maybe that’s the most powerful thing about Anshumaan Pushkar—he doesn’t just honour his craft, he honors the quiet, persistent child who had faith in himself, to craft his dreams into reality.
