There is a moment roughly an hour into the first film when Hamza, deep inside a city that wants him dead, sits down to eat at a roadside stall run by a fussy, talkative man who complains about the price of onions. Nothing about the exchange advances the plot. No secret is passed, no threat is made, no clue is planted. And yet most people who walk out of the theater remember that man, Jameel Jamali, as vividly as they remember the gunfights. That is not an accident. It is the clearest evidence of what makes this franchise different from almost everything else Bollywood has produced in the action register: Aditya Dhar treats the people standing at the edges of the frame as if they matter, and because he does, the audience does too.

The thesis of this piece is simple to state and harder to fully appreciate. Dhurandhar succeeds not because of its lead, though Ranveer Singh is extraordinary, but because of the dense human ecology surrounding him. A spy thriller is only as convincing as the world the spy must move through, and a world is made of people, not props. When Dhar spends thirty minutes of expensive screen time on a comic figure who never fires a weapon, he is not padding the runtime. He is building the ground beneath every tense decision Hamza will later have to make. Strip away Jameel, Aalam, Ulfat, Uzair, Sushant, and the rest, and you do not have a leaner thriller. You have a hollow one. The supporting players are the load-bearing walls of the entire structure, and the purpose of what follows is to walk through that structure room by room.

To understand the ensemble properly, it helps to resist the temptation to rank these figures by screen time or to march through them one by one like entries in a cast list. That approach misses the point entirely, because these roles were not designed as isolated showcases. They were designed to do specific jobs inside the machinery of the story. Some of them build the world the audience must believe in. Some of them complicate the protagonist’s path in ways that generate the plot. And some of them speak for the institutions, Indian and Pakistani alike, that loom over every personal choice the characters make. Sorting the cast by function rather than fame reveals the architecture Dhar was actually working with, and it is a far more interesting blueprint than any popularity contest could produce.

How an Ensemble Holds a Spy Thriller Together

Most Bollywood action vehicles operate on a star economy. The hero absorbs the light, a villain absorbs the menace, a love interest absorbs the tenderness, and everyone else exists to react. The supporting bench in such films is functional furniture: the loyal sidekick who dies to raise the stakes, the corrupt official who exists to be punched, the comic relief shoehorned in to give the audience a breather. You could swap most of these figures between films without anyone noticing, because they have jobs but no interiors.

Dhar rejects this economy almost entirely, and the rejection is the source of much of the franchise’s power. Consider what a deep-cover narrative actually demands. Hamza is not fighting a single antagonist in a clean duel. He is surviving inside a society, pretending to belong to it, earning trust he intends to betray, and reading every face around him for the flicker of suspicion that could end his life. For that premise to grip an audience, the society itself has to feel real, populated, and unpredictable. A flat backdrop of generic gangsters and faceless cops would reduce the whole enterprise to a video game. What Dhar provides instead is a living habitat, and the inhabitants of that habitat are the supporting players.

This is why the franchise can afford to slow down. When Jameel haggles over groceries or when Ulfat presides over a tense family dinner, the tension does not evaporate. It deepens, because every ordinary domestic beat reminds the viewer that Hamza is performing his way through ordinary life, that the danger is not confined to the action set pieces but saturates every cup of tea and every neighborly greeting. The supporting cast carries this saturation. They are the reason the quiet scenes are not dead air. A lesser film would have cut them to keep the pace brisk. Dhar understood that pace is not the same as tension, and that a thriller which is only ever loud is a thriller the audience eventually tunes out.

There is a structural logic at work as well. In a story where the protagonist must hide his true self at all times, the surrounding figures become the only available windows into truth. Hamza cannot tell us what he feels, because telling anyone what he feels would get him killed. So the franchise externalizes his inner life onto the people around him. The warmth he cannot express flows toward Jameel and his family. The contempt he must swallow attaches to figures like Uzair. The institutional loneliness he endures is mirrored back to him through his handler. Each supporting role is, in a sense, a piece of Hamza he is forbidden to show directly. This is sophisticated screenwriting, and it is the kind of design that rewards a second viewing, when you begin to notice how carefully each figure has been positioned to reflect something the lead must keep buried.

The other thing the ensemble accomplishes is moral texture. A propaganda film, which Dhurandhar has frequently been accused of being, would render the Pakistani milieu as uniformly villainous, a gallery of monsters to be dispatched without complication. The presence of fully realized supporting figures resists that flattening. When the audience comes to love a Pakistani grocer, fear a Pakistani crime lord as a person rather than a symbol, and feel the weariness of a Pakistani general doing his job, the simple binary of the propaganda accusation becomes much harder to sustain. The supporting cast is, whether by design or instinct, the franchise’s most effective rebuttal to its harshest critics. Whether that rebuttal fully holds is a question worth returning to, but it begins here, with the decision to make the people on the other side of the border into human beings rather than targets.

With that framework established, the rest of this analysis groups the cast by the work each figure performs. First come the world-builders, the figures whose primary job is to make the milieu feel inhabited and real. Then the complications, the rival powers and institutional forces who bend the plot. Finally the institutional voices, the handlers and officials whose decisions, made far from the streets of the city, determine whether Hamza lives or dies.

The World-Builders: Jameel, Aalam, and Ulfat

The first group of supporting figures share a single function even though they occupy very different corners of the story. Jameel Jamali, Mohammad Aalam, and Ulfat exist primarily to make the world believable. They are the texture of daily life in a place the audience has never been and would otherwise have no way to picture. Their job is not to push the plot forward in dramatic lurches but to convince the viewer that the streets, homes, and kitchens Hamza moves through are real, lived-in, and worth caring about. Get this group wrong and the entire enterprise collapses into a glossy tourist’s idea of a foreign city. Get it right, as Dhar largely does, and the audience forgets it is watching a set.

Jameel Jamali and the Comedy That Earns Its Place

Of every figure in the franchise who is not the lead, Jameel Jamali is the one audiences talk about first. Played by Rakesh Bedi, a veteran whose comic timing was honed across decades of Indian film and television, Jameel is a small businessman and neighborhood fixture, a man whose chief weapons are his mouth and his bottomless appetite for gossip. On paper he sounds like the laziest possible inclusion: comic relief in a grim espionage saga, the kind of role that usually announces a screenwriter running out of ideas. In practice, Bedi and Dhar turn him into the emotional anchor of the first film, and the way they pull it off is a small masterclass in how to fold humor into menace without dissolving either one.

The first thing to understand about Jameel is that his comedy is never positioned against the tension. It is woven into it. When Bedi delivers a long, hilarious monologue about a neighbor’s faithless son-in-law, the laughter the audience feels coexists with a low hum of dread, because the viewer knows what Jameel does not: that the friendly stranger nodding along is a foreign agent who could be exposed at any second. The humor does not break the tension. It heightens it by reminding us how high the stakes are even in the most trivial conversation. Hamza has to laugh at the right places, react with the right warmth, remember the names of people he has never met. Every joke is also a test he must pass. Bedi plays his half of these exchanges with complete sincerity, as a man simply enjoying company, which makes Hamza’s performance within the performance all the more nerve-wracking to watch.

Bedi’s genius lies in restraint. A lesser actor handed a comic part in a big-budget thriller would mug for the camera, push every line, signal to the audience that he knows he is the funny one. Bedi does none of this. He plays Jameel as a man who is not trying to be amusing at all, which is precisely why he is so amusing. The grumbling about prices, the conspiratorial whispers, the wounded pride when a joke lands flat, all of it arrives with the unhurried naturalism of someone who has lived a whole life off camera. There is no winking. There is only a fully inhabited human being, and the audience laughs because they recognize him, not because they have been instructed to.

The scenes where Jameel matters most are the ones with no obvious dramatic purpose. Early in the first film, there is a long stretch where Hamza simply spends an evening with Jameel and a few neighbors, sharing food, listening to complaints, being folded into the rhythms of the street. By any conventional editing logic this passage should not exist. It does not advance the mission. What it does, invisibly, is purchase the audience’s belief in Hamza’s cover. By the time the plot turns dangerous, we have watched him become part of this community, and we feel the weight of every relationship he is preparing to exploit. Jameel is the chief instrument of that purchase. His warmth is the currency Hamza spends.

There is also a darker function buried in the warmth, and it is what elevates the role from charming to essential. Because Jameel is so lovable, his proximity to Hamza becomes a source of unbearable suspense. The audience does not fear for Hamza alone. They fear for Jameel, an innocent who has no idea that the friend he trusts is a weapon aimed at his entire world. Every scene the two share carries a buried question: what happens to this kind, silly, decent man when the truth comes out? Dhar understands that the most effective way to make a hero’s deception feel costly is to attach it to someone the audience cannot bear to see hurt. Jameel is that someone. His relationship to Hamza’s adopted daughter figure, explored at length in our analysis of Yalina Jamali, deepens this stake further, binding the spy to a family rather than a single friend.

Why do audiences cheer for him so openly? Part of it is Bedi’s craft, but part of it is structural. In a story crowded with men who lie for a living, Jameel is the rare figure who has nothing to hide. He is exactly what he appears to be. In a film about the corrosive cost of deception, an honest fool becomes a kind of moral oasis, and the audience clings to him as gratefully as Hamza secretly does. He is the franchise’s reminder of what ordinary life feels like, and what the espionage machine is willing to grind up in pursuit of its goals. When the second film, examined fully in our complete analysis of Dhurandhar The Revenge, pays off the relationships planted around Jameel, the emotional return on Dhar’s earlier investment is enormous. None of it would land without those apparently aimless early evenings of grumbling and gossip.

Mohammad Aalam and Characterization Through Performance

If Jameel is the ensemble’s heart, Mohammad Aalam, played by Gaurav Gera, is its proof that casting is itself an act of writing. On the page, Aalam is a relatively modest role, a fixer and middleman operating in the grey economy that surrounds Rehman Dakait’s operation. The lines could have been delivered by any competent actor and the plot would have proceeded unchanged. What Gera brings is a specificity that no script could fully dictate, a set of physical and vocal choices that transform a functional part into a person the audience can describe in detail after a single viewing.

Gera, best known to Indian audiences for a long career in comedy and sketch performance, makes an unexpected choice with Aalam. He plays him quietly, with a watchfulness that suggests a man who has survived a dangerous business by saying less than he knows. There is a nervous energy underneath the calm, a sense of someone constantly calculating which way the wind is blowing and how to position himself to avoid being crushed by the larger powers he serves. This is the survival posture of everyone who lives in the orbit of violent men without being violent themselves, and Gera locates it with remarkable economy. A flick of the eyes toward the exit, a slightly too eager laugh at a powerful man’s joke, the way his shoulders drop a fraction when a tense meeting ends without bloodshed. These are not scripted beats. They are an actor thinking inside a role.

What a different actor would not have brought is the undertone of decency that flickers through Aalam without ever fully surfacing. Gera plays him as a man who has made compromises he is not proud of, who would help if helping were safe, who keeps his head down because the alternative is to lose it. This ambivalence matters enormously to the franchise’s larger project. Aalam is the human face of the ordinary people caught between the underworld and the state, neither hero nor villain, just someone trying to keep breathing in an environment where breathing is not guaranteed. Through him, the audience understands that the criminal world of the city, mapped in detail in our study of the Karachi underworld in Dhurandhar, is not populated solely by monsters and saints. It is populated by people, most of whom are simply navigating an impossible situation as best they can.

There is a particular sequence where Aalam must broker a tense arrangement while clearly terrified that it will go wrong, and Gera plays the fear so honestly that the audience’s sympathy attaches to him almost against its will. We are not supposed to care about a middleman in a criminal enterprise, and yet we do, because Gera has given him an inner weather. This is the kind of performance that gets overlooked in awards conversations because it is not showy, but it is exactly the sort of work that makes a world feel three-dimensional. Remove Aalam and the city loses one of its load-bearing ordinary people. The plot would survive. The texture would not.

Ulfat and the Domestic Life of a Crime Lord

Ulfat, played by Saumya Tandon, occupies one of the franchise’s most quietly subversive positions. She is the wife of Rehman Dakait, the crime lord whose menace anchors the first film and whose full psychology we examine in our Rehman Dakait character analysis. It would have been easy, and entirely conventional, to write her as set dressing: the glamorous arm-piece, the trophy who confirms the villain’s wealth and power and otherwise has nothing to do. Dhar and Tandon refuse that path. Ulfat becomes the lens through which the audience sees Rehman not as a force of nature but as a husband, a man with a home, a domestic existence that runs parallel to the brutality of his public life.

This is a far more dangerous storytelling choice than it first appears, because humanizing a villain risks excusing him. Dhar walks the line carefully. Ulfat does not soften Rehman so much as complicate him. When we watch the two of them in private, the audience sees a relationship with its own history, its own tendernesses and resentments, its own unspoken negotiations. Rehman is gentler at home than on the street, and this gentleness does not make him less frightening. It makes him more so, because it reveals that the man capable of ordinary love is the same man capable of ordering ordinary death. The horror of Rehman is sharpened, not blunted, by the discovery that he goes home to a wife who knows him as something other than a killer.

Tandon’s performance is built on a foundation of knowing. Ulfat is not naive about what her husband does. She has made her peace with the violence that funds her life, and Tandon plays that accommodation with a steeliness that prevents Ulfat from becoming a victim the audience can comfortably pity. There are moments when her gaze settles on Rehman with an expression that is impossible to fully parse, somewhere between love and appraisal, as if she is forever measuring how much of the man she married still survives inside the empire he has become. This ambiguity is the role’s great strength. Ulfat is complicit, and she is also trapped, and she is also, in her way, powerful within the narrow domain available to her. Tandon holds all three truths at once.

The domestic scenes Ulfat presides over also serve a vital structural purpose for Hamza’s mission. They are the spaces where the spy comes closest to the heart of the enemy operation, where a single misstep at a dinner table could prove more lethal than any gunfight. By giving Rehman a credible home life, the franchise creates the high-wire domestic sequences that are among its most tense, precisely because the danger is so genteel. A wrong word over dessert, a glance held a beat too long, a question about family answered imperfectly, any of these could unravel everything. Ulfat is the presiding intelligence of these spaces, and Tandon plays her as someone whose social radar is far sharper than the men around her assume. The viewer is never entirely sure how much she sees, and that uncertainty is a gift to the suspense.

What Ulfat ultimately reveals is the franchise’s interest in the private cost of public violence, a theme threaded throughout the films and unpacked in our examination of the duology’s themes and symbolism. Through her, we understand that the criminal empire is not an abstraction. It has a kitchen, a bedroom, a marriage. It generates not just bodies in the street but a woman who must live with the man who put them there. That insistence on the domestic reality behind the spectacle is one of the things that lifts the franchise above its genre, and Ulfat is its quietest, most important carrier.

The Complications: Uzair Baloch and General Shamshad Khan

The second group of figures does something the world-builders do not. Where Jameel, Aalam, and Ulfat make the milieu feel real, Uzair Baloch and General Shamshad Khan actively bend the plot, generating obstacles, rivalries, and pressures that force Hamza and the men he is embedded with into harder and harder choices. These are the complications, the figures whose ambitions and institutional weight create the friction that drama runs on. Without them the world would be vivid but inert. With them, it becomes a pressure cooker.

Uzair Baloch, the Rival Power Center

Uzair Baloch, played by Danish Pandor, is the franchise’s most underrated structural device. On the surface he is simply another gangster, a rival operating in the same dangerous ecosystem as Rehman Dakait. But his real function is to provide a second pole of power, and that second pole transforms the geometry of the entire story. In a narrative with only one strongman, every conflict reduces to the hero versus the villain. Introduce a credible rival, and suddenly the underworld has politics. Alliances become possible. Betrayals become profitable. The protagonist gains room to maneuver by playing one power against another, which is exactly how real intelligence work operates and exactly what makes Hamza’s path so treacherous.

Pandor plays Uzair with a coiled volatility that contrasts sharply with Rehman’s colder control. Where Rehman is a strategist who has learned to wait, Uzair is hungrier, more impulsive, more willing to gamble. This temperamental difference is not incidental. It is the engine of the complications he generates. A patient rival can be predicted. An impulsive one cannot, and his unpredictability ripples outward, forcing everyone around him to hedge, to prepare for sudden moves, to second-guess. Hamza must factor Uzair into every calculation, because Uzair is the variable that could upend any arrangement at any moment. Pandor communicates this danger physically, through a restlessness in the body, a tendency to fill silence with movement, the bearing of a man who trusts no one and expects betrayal because he is always contemplating it himself.

The role draws, loosely and with significant fictionalization, on a real figure of the same name who was a genuine power in the criminal politics of the city. The franchise is careful here, as it is throughout, to inspire rather than to document. What the films preserve is the structural truth: that the underworld was never a monolith, that it was riven by rivalries between factions and personalities, and that those rivalries created the openings through which outside forces, including foreign intelligence, could insert themselves. The historical reality of fragmented criminal power is the soil in which Hamza’s mission could plausibly take root, and Uzair is the franchise’s chief embodiment of that fragmentation. The deeper history of these real-world echoes is traced in our analysis of the Karachi underworld.

What makes Uzair more than a plot mechanism is the wounded ego Pandor lets show through the bravado. This is a man who believes he deserves more than the position he occupies, who watches Rehman command the respect he craves, and who is forever scheming to close the gap. That resentment is recognizable and almost pitiable, and it gives Uzair a psychological reality that a pure antagonist would lack. He is dangerous not because he is evil in some abstract sense but because he is ambitious and aggrieved, a combination that has fueled more violence in human history than any ideology. Pandor finds the small, human pettiness underneath the gangster posturing, and that pettiness is what makes Uzair believable rather than cartoonish.

For Hamza specifically, Uzair represents a constant temptation and a constant threat. A rival power is a potential asset to a spy: someone whose enmity toward the main target can be exploited, whose ambitions can be steered. But a volatile rival is also a loose cannon who might expose the whole operation through some reckless act. Hamza’s management of Uzair, the way he must keep him useful without letting him become uncontrollable, is some of the most sophisticated tradecraft the films depict. It mirrors the larger truth of the protagonist’s position, dissected in full in our Hamza Ali Mazari character analysis: that survival depends not on strength but on the endless, exhausting calibration of relationships with people who would kill him if they knew who he was.

General Shamshad Khan and Institutional Pakistan

If Uzair represents the criminal Pakistan of the streets, General Shamshad Khan, played by Raj Zutshi and introduced in the second film, represents its institutional counterpart: the uniformed, official, state-sanctioned Pakistan that operates in air-conditioned offices and issues orders that ripple down to the dust of the city. The introduction of the General in the sequel is one of the franchise’s most important expansions of scope, because it widens the story from a tale of underworld infiltration into something closer to a confrontation between states, with the criminal world revealed as merely the lowest, dirtiest layer of a much taller structure.

Zutshi plays the General with the bureaucratic gravity of a man accustomed to being obeyed. There is no flamboyance, no theatrical villainy. Shamshad is frightening precisely because he is so controlled, so certain of his own authority, so insulated from the consequences of his decisions by layers of subordinates who carry them out. This is a different and arguably more chilling kind of antagonist than the volatile Uzair or even the magnetic Rehman. The General does not need to raise his voice because the entire apparatus of the state amplifies it for him. Zutshi understands that institutional power expresses itself through stillness, and he gives Shamshad a watchful calm that suggests reserves of force the audience never fully sees but always feels.

The contrast the franchise draws between the criminal Pakistan of the underworld and the institutional Pakistan of the General is one of its sharpest pieces of political observation. The underworld figures, for all their brutality, are legible. They want money, territory, respect, survival. Their motives are human-scale and comprehensible. The General operates on a different plane entirely, pursuing strategic objectives whose logic is national rather than personal, willing to sacrifice individuals and even whole networks for ends that exist on a map rather than in a heart. This is the franchise quietly arguing that the most dangerous violence is not the impulsive cruelty of a street rival but the cold, planned, deniable violence of a state that has decided certain things must happen. Shamshad is the face of that argument.

For Hamza, the General changes the nature of the threat. The street-level dangers of the first film were immediate and physical: a wrong word, a recognized face, a gun in the dark. Shamshad introduces a slower, more strategic danger, the possibility of being identified not by a suspicious neighbor but by an intelligence apparatus with patience and resources. The second film, whose escalations we chart in our complete analysis of Dhurandhar The Revenge, uses the General to raise the ceiling on the threat, to make the audience understand that Hamza has graduated from surviving a neighborhood to surviving a nation-state. Zutshi’s restraint is essential to selling this escalation. A loud villain would have felt like more of the same. A quiet institutional one feels like a genuine step up in danger, because you cannot punch your way out of a bureaucracy.

The General also serves the franchise’s interest in showing the machinery on both sides of the border as fundamentally similar. The Indian institutions that send Hamza into the field, embodied by figures we will turn to shortly, operate with the same cold calculus as the Pakistani ones that hunt him. By giving the enemy state a thinking, competent, recognizably professional face in Shamshad, the franchise resists the temptation to make the opposition stupid. A spy thriller in which the enemy is incompetent is not suspenseful. By making Shamshad formidable, Dhar pays the audience the compliment of treating the contest as real, and Zutshi repays Dhar’s faith with a performance that never reaches for villainy and is all the more menacing for it.

The Institutional Voices: Sushant, Devavrat, and Shazia

The third group occupies a strange and important position. Sushant Bansal, Devavrat Kapoor, and Shazia Bano are the figures who speak for institutions, the handlers and officials and crossover players whose decisions, made in rooms far from the streets of the city, determine whether Hamza lives or dies. They rarely face physical danger themselves. Their power is bureaucratic, their violence remote. And yet they shape the protagonist’s fate more decisively than any gangster, because they are the ones who decide what he is for, when he is useful, and when he becomes expendable. If the world-builders give the franchise its texture and the complications give it friction, the institutional voices give it its conscience, or, more often, its troubling absence of one.

Sushant Bansal and the Loneliness of a Handler

Of all the supporting figures, Sushant Bansal, played by Manav Gohil, may be the most quietly heartbreaking. He is Hamza’s field handler, the single thread connecting the spy in the field to the agency that sent him, the one person on earth who knows who Hamza really is. In most spy films the handler is a plot device, a voice in an earpiece who delivers exposition and orders. Dhar and Gohil insist on something richer. Sushant is a character, a man with his own burdens, and through him the franchise explores one of its central preoccupations: the unbearable isolation of covert work.

Consider the strange intimacy of the handler relationship. Sushant is the only human being with whom Hamza can be his real self, and yet their contact must be rationed, hidden, conducted in stolen moments and coded exchanges. The handler is simultaneously the spy’s lifeline and a source of mortal danger, because every meeting risks exposure. Gohil plays Sushant as a man acutely aware of this paradox, who carries the weight of being responsible for a life he can protect only from a distance and only imperfectly. There is guilt in the performance, the guilt of the man who stays safe while sending another into the fire, and there is also a fierce, frustrated tenderness, the affection of someone who has come to care for an asset he is institutionally forbidden to treat as a friend.

The Hamza-Sushant dynamic captures the loneliness of the spy’s existence with more precision than any monologue could. Their exchanges are charged with everything that cannot be said. When they meet, there is relief on both sides, the relief of two people who can briefly stop pretending, but the relief is always shadowed by the knowledge that the meeting must end, that Hamza must return to a life of total performance, and that Sushant must return to the agonizing helplessness of waiting for a signal that may never come. Gohil communicates this with small gestures, a hand that lingers a moment too long on a shoulder, an instruction delivered in a voice that catches, a goodbye that both men know might be the last. The recruitment apparatus that placed Hamza in this position, and the men who run it, are examined in our Ajay Sanyal character analysis, and Sushant is the human cost of that apparatus made visible.

The franchise uses Sushant to ask a hard question about the institutions that wage covert war: what do they owe the people they send into the dark? Sushant clearly believes the agency owes Hamza more than it is prepared to give, and his quiet rebellions, the corners he cuts to keep his asset safe, the risks he takes that protocol forbids, are the franchise’s way of locating decency inside a machine that is not built for it. He is the institutional voice that has not forgotten that the asset is a person. In a story full of figures who weigh human lives against strategic objectives, Sushant is the one who keeps flinching at the math, and Gohil makes that flinching the moral center of the institutional side of the story.

There is also a structural elegance to how the franchise deploys him. Because Sushant is the only character who shares Hamza’s secret, scenes between them are the only moments when the audience gets to see the protagonist drop his mask completely. These scenes are precious and rare, and the franchise rations them deliberately, so that each one feels like coming up for air. Gohil’s job is to make the audience trust that this is a safe harbor, however temporary, and he does it by playing Sushant as utterly reliable in his loyalty even when he is unreliable in his ability to protect. The relationship becomes the emotional spine of the institutional plot, the human relationship that the cold calculus of the agency keeps threatening to crush.

Devavrat Kapoor and the Bureaucracy of Survival

If Sushant is the institution at its most humane, Devavrat Kapoor, played by Akash Khurana, is the institution at its most abstract. As a senior figure in the apparatus of Indian external affairs, Devavrat occupies the heights from which operations are authorized, funded, or quietly abandoned. He is the political dimension of the story, the reminder that Hamza’s survival depends not only on his own skill but on decisions made by men in distant offices who will never know his face and who weigh his life against considerations of policy, optics, and political convenience.

Khurana, a veteran of stage and screen with a natural air of authority, plays Devavrat with the smooth, careful diction of a man who has spent a career choosing words for their deniability. There is something deliberately bloodless about the performance, and it is exactly right. Devavrat is not a villain. He is a functionary of the state, doing what functionaries do: managing risk, protecting institutions, calculating costs. But the franchise is sharply aware that from the perspective of the man in the field, this bureaucratic rationality can look indistinguishable from betrayal. When a minister decides that an operation has become politically inconvenient, the spy who is suddenly cut loose does not experience that decision as prudent statecraft. He experiences it as abandonment. Khurana plays Devavrat as a man who would be genuinely puzzled by the accusation, because from where he sits, he is simply doing his job responsibly.

This gap, between how decisions feel in the office and how they land in the field, is one of the franchise’s most pointed observations about the relationship between the state and the individuals who serve it. Devavrat is the embodiment of the principle that the people who plan operations and the people who live inside them occupy entirely different moral universes. The minister can authorize a man’s deployment into mortal danger and then attend a dinner party. The man so deployed has no such luxury. By giving this institutional callousness a polished, reasonable, even sympathetic face in Khurana’s performance, the franchise avoids the cheap move of making the bureaucrat a mustache-twirling traitor. Devavrat is worse than a traitor in a way, because he is sincere. He genuinely believes the system he serves is just, and his sincerity is what makes the system’s indifference to individual lives so chilling.

The strategic logic that figures like Devavrat embody, the way operations are conceived, authorized, and managed from the top, connects directly to the franchise’s broader account of covert statecraft, which we lay out in detail in our explanation of Operation Dhurandhar. Within that account, Devavrat is the figure who reminds the audience that no operation, however brilliantly executed in the field, is safe from the shifting winds of politics back home. The spy can do everything right and still be doomed by a decision made for reasons that have nothing to do with him. Khurana makes this terrifying truth feel mundane, which is precisely how such truths usually arrive.

Shazia Bano and the Crossover Question

The most discussed of the franchise’s supporting appearances is also its most divisive: the cameo by Yami Gautam as Shazia Bano in the second film, a crossover from her role in the film Haq. The appearance functions on two levels simultaneously, and the tension between them is worth examining honestly, because it touches on questions about what the franchise is trying to become.

On the level of the story, Shazia’s brief appearance is handled with more care than most cameos receive. Gautam, a performer of considerable range, does not coast on the recognition factor. She plays the moment for what it is worth within the scene, lending the appearance a weight that helps it feel like a genuine intersection of two narratives rather than a wink at the audience. For viewers who recognize the crossover, there is a frisson of expanded scope, a sense that these stories occupy a shared reality larger than any single film. For viewers who do not, the appearance still reads as a credible figure passing through Hamza’s world. That dual functionality is not easy to achieve, and Gautam mostly achieves it.

On the level of strategy, however, the cameo raises a question the franchise cannot entirely answer: is this storytelling or is it marketing? The crossover signals an ambition toward a shared cinematic universe, the kind of interconnected web of films that has dominated global blockbuster cinema for over a decade. There is commercial logic to this. A universe generates anticipation, rewards loyalty, and turns each new release into an event whose stakes extend beyond its own borders. But there is also artistic risk. A cameo that exists primarily to advertise another property can puncture the carefully built reality of the film it interrupts, reminding the audience that they are watching a product in a franchise rather than living inside a story. The question is whether Shazia’s appearance enriches the world or merely gestures beyond it.

The honest assessment is that it does a little of both, and which one dominates depends on the viewer. For those invested in the larger ambitions of this filmmaking unit, the crossover is a thrilling promise of things to come, a sign that Dhar is building something with the scale and interconnection of the great cinematic universes. For those who came for the specific, intense, self-contained story of one spy in one impossible situation, the cameo can feel like a momentary intrusion of the boardroom into the narrative. The franchise wants to have it both ways, and to its credit, the appearance is brief and skillful enough that it never derails the film. But it is the one supporting element in the entire ensemble whose primary justification may lie outside the story itself, and an honest analysis has to name that. The world-builders and complications and even the other institutional voices all earn their places through what they contribute to the narrative architecture. Shazia is the one figure whose presence is at least partly explained by ambitions that have nothing to do with Hamza’s mission, and that distinction is worth preserving.

How the Franchise Introduces Each Figure

A useful way to appreciate the care behind this ensemble is to study how each figure is introduced, because a first appearance is where a supporting role either becomes a person or stays a function. The franchise is unusually disciplined about these introductions, refusing the lazy shorthand by which most films establish minor players. Nobody walks in wearing a label. Each figure is allowed to arrive the way real people arrive, in the middle of their own lives, and the audience is trusted to assemble an understanding from behavior rather than exposition.

Jameel’s entrance is the clearest example. He does not announce himself as the comic figure. He simply appears in the flow of street life, already mid-complaint, already enmeshed in the petty dramas of his neighborhood, and the audience laughs before it has been told to. The introduction establishes everything essential about him through pure behavior: his garrulousness, his self-importance, his fundamental harmlessness. By the time he has finished his first proper exchange with Hamza, the viewer knows exactly who he is, and not a single line of dialogue was spent telling us. This is economy of the highest order, the kind that looks effortless precisely because so much craft went into it.

Rehman’s wife is introduced through her command of a domestic space rather than through any statement about her role. We meet Ulfat presiding, managing, observing, and the audience understands her position in the household before anyone explains it. Saumya Tandon’s first scene communicates authority and wariness simultaneously, planting the seed of the ambiguity that will define the role. Similarly, the rival Uzair is introduced not through a title card identifying him as a competitor but through the friction his mere presence creates, the way the temperature of a room changes when he enters it. Danish Pandor plays the entrance as a man entering hostile territory and pretending it is his own, and that single choice tells the audience everything about where Uzair stands in the hierarchy of power.

The institutional figures are introduced with a deliberate coldness that contrasts sharply with the warmth of the street-level introductions. We meet Devavrat in a setting of bureaucratic comfort, insulated from the danger his decisions create, and Akash Khurana’s controlled diction immediately establishes the gulf between the office and the field. The handler Sushant is introduced through the specific texture of his contact with Hamza, the furtiveness, the rationed intimacy, so that the audience grasps the nature of the relationship before it is ever described. Manav Gohil’s first scene with Ranveer Singh is a study in everything-that-cannot-be-said, and it sets the emotional terms for everything that follows. The General arrives later, in the second film, with the gravity of an institution rather than a man, Raj Zutshi’s stillness announcing a different order of threat the moment he appears.

What unites these introductions is a refusal to condescend to the audience. The franchise assumes its viewers are capable of reading behavior, of inferring relationships, of assembling a person from gestures. This assumption is itself a kind of respect, and it pays off in an ensemble that feels discovered rather than constructed. Each figure seems to have existed before the camera found them and will continue after it leaves, which is the highest illusion a supporting role can achieve.

The Ensemble Across Both Films

The supporting cast does not stand still across the duology. The progression from the first film to the second reshapes the ensemble in ways that track the franchise’s expanding ambitions, and reading that progression reveals how deliberately Dhar managed his world over two installments. The arc of the supporting players is, in miniature, the arc of the entire franchise: an intimate, street-level story widening into a confrontation between states.

In the first film, the dominant supporting energy is local and human. The figures who matter most are the ones who populate Hamza’s immediate world: Jameel and his circle, Aalam in his grey economy, Ulfat in her household, Uzair as the volatile rival next door. The texture is neighborhood texture, and the dangers are intimate dangers, the perils of a wrong word at a dinner table or a recognized face in a crowded lane. The supporting cast in this installment is primarily concerned with making a single dangerous place feel real, and the emotional stakes are correspondingly personal. We fear for relationships, for the small community Hamza has infiltrated, for the people he will inevitably betray.

The second film widens the aperture, and the ensemble shifts to match. The introduction of General Shamshad Khan signals the move from the criminal underworld to the institutional one, from the streets to the halls of state power. The threat is no longer a suspicious neighbor but a national security apparatus. This expansion does not abandon the intimate figures established in the first film, but it recontextualizes them, revealing the street-level world as merely the lowest layer of a much taller structure. The supporting players who once seemed to define the entire world are now shown to be small figures inside a vast machine, and that revelation is itself a kind of plot development, a widening of perspective that mirrors Hamza’s own growing understanding of the forces arrayed against him.

The fates of the supporting figures across the two films carry significant emotional weight, and the franchise uses them to pay off the investments made earlier. The relationships built so patiently in the first installment become the levers of feeling in the second, when the consequences of Hamza’s deception begin to land. The figures the audience came to love are revealed to have been chess pieces all along, and the dawning of that recognition, both for the characters and for the viewer, is among the most affecting material in the sequel. The franchise had to spend the first film making us care in order to spend the second film making us hurt, and the supporting cast is the mechanism of both the caring and the hurting.

Some figures are deepened, some are diminished, and a few are introduced specifically to raise the ceiling on the threat. The crime lord whose menace anchored the first film recedes in the second, present more as a legacy and an absence than an active force, while the institutional figures step forward to dominate. This shifting of the supporting weight from criminal to institutional Pakistan is one of the franchise’s smartest structural decisions, because it allows the sequel to feel genuinely larger rather than merely louder. The escalation is built into the changing composition of the ensemble itself, and a viewer attentive to who occupies the supporting space in each film can read the franchise’s entire strategic design in that shift.

What the Supporting Cast Represents

Beyond their individual functions, the supporting figures collectively represent something the franchise wants to say about the world its spy inhabits. Read as a group rather than as individuals, the ensemble becomes a kind of argument, a portrait of how power, ordinary life, and institutional violence coexist in a place defined by all three. Each figure is a facet of that portrait, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The world-builders represent the persistence of ordinary life under extraordinary pressure. Jameel haggling over onions, Aalam calculating his survival, Ulfat managing her household: these are images of the stubborn continuity of the everyday, the way people keep complaining and cooking and gossiping even in a city saturated with danger. The franchise insists, through these figures, that the milieu is not merely a battlefield. It is a home to people who have nowhere else to live, and that insistence is what dignifies the world Hamza moves through. Without the world-builders, the city would be a backdrop for violence. With them, it is a place where violence intrudes on lives that were trying to go on regardless.

The complications represent the way ambition and institutional force generate conflict independent of any single villain’s malice. Uzair and the General are not evil in the melodramatic sense. They are nodes of power pursuing their own logics, and the friction between those logics is what drives so much of the danger. Together they represent the franchise’s mature understanding that conflict in the real world rarely springs from a single source of wickedness. It emerges from the collision of competing interests, the resentment of the ambitious, the cold calculations of the powerful. The complications are the franchise’s acknowledgment that the spy is not fighting a person. He is navigating a system of pressures, any of which could crush him.

The institutional voices represent the most uncomfortable truth of all: that the greatest threats to the individual often come not from declared enemies but from the institutions that claim to serve him. Sushant, Devavrat, and the apparatus they speak for embody the franchise’s deep ambivalence about the state that sends men like Hamza into the dark. The handler who cares too much, the minister who calculates too coldly, the machinery that treats human lives as assets to be deployed and discarded: these figures collectively dramatize the cost the state imposes on the individuals who serve it. They are the franchise’s conscience and its critique, the part of the story that refuses to let patriotic spectacle obscure the human price of covert war.

Taken together, the ensemble is a map of the forces that bear on a single vulnerable man trying to survive in an impossible position. Ordinary life pulls at him through the world-builders. Rival ambitions threaten him through the complications. The cold logic of states surrounds him through the institutional voices. The franchise’s protagonist stands at the intersection of all these pressures, and the supporting cast is the rendering of those pressures in human form. To understand the ensemble is to understand the entire weather system in which the central drama unfolds, and that is why no honest account of these films can treat the supporting players as secondary. They are not the background. They are the world, and the world is the story.

The Craft of Casting and the Art of the Small Role

It is worth pausing on a question that runs beneath everything discussed so far: why does this ensemble work when so many big-budget films are populated by forgettable supporting players? The answer lies partly in writing and partly in a casting philosophy that treats every role, however small, as a real acting opportunity rather than a slot to be filled.

Look at who Dhar hired. Rakesh Bedi is not a young find chosen for his marketability. He is a seasoned performer with decades of comic and dramatic work behind him, brought in precisely because the role of Jameel required someone who could make warmth feel effortless. Gaurav Gera, Saumya Tandon, Manav Gohil, Raj Zutshi, Akash Khurana, Danish Pandor: this is a roster of experienced professionals, several of them better known for television or comedy than for prestige cinema. Casting them in a tentpole spy thriller is itself a statement of values. Dhar is signaling that he believes these roles deserve actors who can fill them completely, not faces who will recede politely into the background. The result is an ensemble where even a figure with a handful of scenes arrives fully formed.

There is a lesson here that the broader industry has been slow to learn. Star power draws an audience into the theater, but it is the supporting bench that determines whether they believe what they are watching once the lights go down. The commercial triumph of these films, whose staggering numbers you can explore through the franchise’s complete box office journey interactively, was built on repeat viewing and word of mouth, and word of mouth is driven as much by the moments audiences quote to their friends as by the spectacle. People left the theater imitating Jameel’s complaints, debating Ulfat’s loyalties, marveling at how a quiet middleman like Aalam stuck in their memory. Those are the conversations that fill seats for weeks, and they are generated by the ensemble, not the star.

The casting philosophy also reflects an understanding of how cover identities work in the real intelligence world. A deep-cover operation does not unfold among a handful of dramatic antagonists. It unfolds in a thick crowd of ordinary people, any of whom might notice the small wrong note that gives the spy away. By populating the world with distinct, memorable individuals rather than interchangeable extras, Dhar reproduces the texture of that reality. Hamza is not navigating a few enemies. He is navigating a society, and the density of that society is what makes his task feel genuinely perilous. Every fully realized supporting figure adds a node to the network Hamza must manage, and the cumulative effect is a world that feels less like a film set and more like a place.

Performance choices matter enormously at this scale, because a small role has no time to establish itself through plot. It must announce a complete person in a few gestures. This is why the actors’ instincts are so consequential. Bedi’s decision to underplay the comedy, Gera’s choice to make Aalam watchful rather than nervous-funny, Tandon’s refusal to play Ulfat as a victim, Gohil’s tender guilt, Zutshi’s institutional stillness, Khurana’s bloodless reasonableness, Pandor’s wounded volatility: each of these is a specific, defensible reading of a thin part, and each transforms thinness into depth. The way these performers approach their dialogue, the rhythm and restraint they bring, connects to the larger craft of the films’ writing, which we analyze in our study of Dhurandhar’s dialogue. Good lines need actors who know how to leave space inside them, and this ensemble knows.

Common Misreadings of the Supporting Cast

Because these figures are so vivid and so beloved, they have attracted interpretations that, while understandable, miss what the franchise is actually doing. It is worth correcting a few of the most common misreadings, because each one, once cleared away, reveals something more interesting underneath.

The first misreading is that Jameel exists for comic relief, full stop. This reading treats him as a pleasant distraction from the real business of the thriller, a palate cleanser between action beats. But Jameel is not relief from the tension. He is a generator of it. His function is to make the audience love the world Hamza is betraying, so that the betrayal carries a cost. To call him comic relief is to mistake the surface for the substance. The comedy is the delivery mechanism for an emotional payload that detonates later, when the audience realizes how much of what Jameel represents is at risk. A film that wanted mere relief would have given us a buffoon. Dhar gave us a man we would grieve for, and disguised him as a buffoon so that the grief would ambush us.

The second misreading is that Ulfat humanizes Rehman in order to make us sympathize with the villain. This gets the moral mechanics backward. Ulfat does not make Rehman sympathetic. She makes him comprehensible, which is a different and more disturbing thing. Sympathy invites us to excuse. Comprehension forces us to recognize. By showing that a man capable of monstrous violence is also capable of ordinary domestic tenderness, the franchise denies us the comfort of believing that evil is a separate species from ourselves. Ulfat’s presence is not a softening. It is an indictment of the ease with which ordinary human warmth coexists with extraordinary human cruelty. Those who read her as a tool of villain-rehabilitation have it exactly inverted.

The third misreading concerns the institutional figures, particularly Devavrat. A common view treats the bureaucrats and ministers as the franchise’s clear-cut antagonists, the cold men who betray the brave spy. But the films are more careful than that. Devavrat is not betraying anyone in his own understanding. He is doing his job, and his job is to weigh individual lives against collective interests, which is precisely what we ask such institutions to do. The franchise’s point is not that these men are villains but that the system itself produces outcomes that feel like betrayal to those caught in its gears, regardless of anyone’s intentions. To read Devavrat as a simple traitor is to let the system off the hook by locating its cruelty in a bad individual rather than in its structure. The films are smarter than that, and so should their audience be.

A fourth misreading is that the supporting cast is fundamentally separable from the lead, a kind of enjoyable garnish around the main course of Ranveer Singh’s performance. But Singh’s work, brilliant as it is, depends entirely on the ensemble to function. His performance is largely about concealment, about the spy hiding his true self, and concealment only registers when there are people to conceal it from. Every scene in which Hamza performs friendship with Jameel, fear of Rehman, deference to the institution, is a scene in which the supporting figure is an active partner in the lead performance, not a backdrop to it. Singh is reacting to them as much as they are reacting to him, and the depth of his work is impossible without the depth of theirs. The lead and the ensemble are not separable. They are a single organism, and the achievement of the films, examined holistically in our complete analysis of Dhurandhar Part 1, is the integration of the two.

Why the Ensemble Endures

Months after the films dominated theaters, the conversations that persist are telling. People still quote Jameel. They still argue about whether Ulfat knew more than she let on. They still describe the chill of the General’s stillness and the ache of the handler relationship. This durability is the truest measure of what the ensemble accomplished, because spectacle fades from memory far faster than people do. An audience forgets the exact choreography of a gunfight within weeks. They remember a face, a voice, a moment of unexpected tenderness or menace, for years.

The deeper reason the ensemble endures is that each figure connects to something the audience recognizes from their own life. Jameel is the lovable neighbor everyone has known, the one who talks too much and means well. Aalam is the small operator just trying to survive a system bigger than himself. Ulfat is the person who has made her peace with a compromise she cannot undo. Sushant is the colleague who cares more than the institution permits. Devavrat is the manager whose reasonable decisions ruin lives he never sees. Uzair is the ambitious rival eaten alive by his own resentment. These are not exotic figures from a foreign underworld. They are recognizable human types, and the franchise’s genius is to populate a story about espionage on a hostile border with people who feel as familiar as a reader’s own acquaintances.

This recognizability is also where the franchise’s politics become more complicated than its critics allow. It is difficult to maintain a clean us-versus-them framework when the them is composed of a grocer you adore, a wife you understand, a middleman you pity. The supporting cast quietly undermines the binary that the franchise’s loudest detractors accuse it of promoting. Whether that undermining is enough to redeem the films from the propaganda charge is a question reasonable people will continue to debate, and the commercial scale of that debate, reflected in numbers you can track across both installments interactively, shows how deeply these films lodged in the national conversation. But the supporting players are the strongest evidence for the defense, because it is hard to dehumanize an enemy you have been made to love.

Ultimately, the ensemble endures because it embodies a belief about storytelling that has become rare in an era of algorithmic spectacle: that the small parts are not small. That a thriller lives or dies on the credibility of its world, and that a world is people, and that people, even people on screen for ten minutes, deserve to be written and performed as if they have lives that continue after the cut. Aditya Dhar built a franchise on that belief, and the proof of it is that audiences walked out talking not only about the spy at the center but about the grocer, the wife, the rival, the handler, and the quiet middleman at the edges. That is what an ensemble is for. That is what it can do when a filmmaker takes it seriously. And it is, more than the action or the scale or the star, the reason this franchise will be studied as a turning point in how Bollywood builds its worlds.

The Moments That Made Them Unforgettable

It is one thing to argue in the abstract that this cast carries the duology. It is another to point at the specific beats where you can watch it happen. The proof of the ensemble is in particular passages, the small set pieces that lodged in the memory of everyone who left the theater, and walking through a handful of them shows exactly how each performer earns the claims made for them across this analysis.

Take the roadside meal early in the first installment, the one mentioned at the very start of this piece. On the page it is dead time, a pause between plot turns. On the screen it becomes a tightrope walk. Rakesh Bedi natters on about onions and ungrateful neighbors while Ranveer Singh listens, laughs at the right intervals, and lets a flicker of genuine fondness cross his face before remembering himself. The brilliance is that the moviegoer experiences two stories at once: a sweet scene of two men sharing a meal, and a terrifying scene of an operative passing a test he cannot afford to fail. Bedi never signals that he is aware of the second story, and that obliviousness is precisely what makes the passage hum. The crowd leans in not because anything is exploding but because everything could.

Consider too the family dinner Ulfat presides over in Rehman’s home. Saumya Tandon does almost nothing dramatic. She serves, she watches, she lets a question hang a beat too long before answering. Yet the temperature of the scene is unbearable, because the viewer understands that the most dangerous room in the entire city is this genteel dining table, where a wrong word over dessert could prove more lethal than any firefight in the streets of Lyari. Tandon’s quiet command of the space, the way her gaze keeps drifting to read faces, plants the suspicion that she sees far more than the men around her assume. The crowd never learns the full extent of what she knows, and that withheld knowledge is what makes every meal in that house a held breath.

The handler meetings between Hamza and Sushant deliver a different flavor of unforgettable. Manav Gohil and Ranveer Singh play these reunions as the only moments in the entire story when the protagonist is allowed to be himself, and the relief is palpable on both sides. Watch the way Gohil lets his professional composure crack just slightly, a hand resting too long on a shoulder, an order delivered in a voice that catches. These are not the beats of a plot device. They are the beats of a man who cares about another man and is institutionally forbidden to say so. When one such meeting ends and the two part, both knowing it might be the last time, the ache is real precisely because Gohil has spent his limited minutes making the bond feel earned rather than asserted.

Danish Pandor gets his defining moment in the friction he generates simply by entering a room controlled by someone else. There is a confrontation in the first picture where Uzair, all coiled volatility, pushes against a power structure that does not respect him, and Pandor lets the wounded ego show through the bravado so clearly that the viewer almost pities him even while fearing what his resentment might unleash. The moment works because Pandor refuses to play a cartoon. He plays a man who believes he deserves more than he has been given, and that grievance is the most human and most dangerous thing about him.

Raj Zutshi’s defining beat in the second installment is, fittingly, the absence of any beat at all. The General does not get an explosive entrance. He gets a quiet scene of issuing an instruction, and the chill comes from how little he has to do to make the order absolute. Zutshi lowers his voice rather than raising it, and the moviegoer understands instantly that this is a different order of threat than anything in the first picture, a power that does not need to perform itself because an entire apparatus performs it on his behalf. The stillness is the statement, and Zutshi trusts it completely.

Gaurav Gera’s most telling passage is the brokered arrangement where Aalam is visibly terrified that everything will go wrong. Gera plays the fear without vanity, letting the sweat and the darting eyes and the slightly too eager laughter tell the story of a man who has survived a lethal business by being useful and invisible at once. The viewer is not supposed to care about a middleman, and yet the honesty of Gera’s terror earns a sympathy that arrives almost unbidden. It is a small role given a full inner weather, and that weather is what makes the city around it feel populated by real people rather than props.

Even Akash Khurana, whose Devavrat barely leaves his comfortable office, gets a moment that lingers. There is an exchange where the minister weighs a man’s life against a political calculation with the unhurried diction of someone discussing a budget line, and Khurana plays it without a trace of malice. That bloodless reasonableness is the whole point. The viewer recoils not because Devavrat is cruel but because he is sincere, genuinely convinced that the system he serves is just, and his sincerity is more frightening than any villainy could be. In a single calm conversation, Khurana dramatizes the entire gulf between the men who plan operations and the men who live inside them.

Strung together, these moments make the larger argument concrete. None of them is an action highlight. None of them involves the protagonist doing anything heroic in the conventional sense. They are conversations, meals, instructions, silences, the small human transactions that fill the spaces between the gunfights. And yet they are the passages people remember and quote and rewatch, because they are where the story breathes and where its danger feels most real. The set pieces give the duology its spectacle. These quieter beats give it its soul, and the cast assembled to play them is the reason the soul is there at all. A director who did not believe the small roles mattered would have trimmed every one of these passages to keep the engine racing. Aditya Dhar kept them, trusted them, and built two of the most talked-about pictures in recent memory on the unglamorous foundation they provide.

There is a final lesson buried in these passages, and it concerns the relationship between spectacle and memory. A decade from now, the precise choreography of the chases and shootouts will have blurred together in the minds of most who saw them, as action always does. What will remain sharp is Bedi grumbling over a meal, Tandon reading a face across a dinner table, Gohil’s hand lingering on a shoulder, Zutshi lowering his voice until a room goes cold. These are the images that survive, because they are tethered to recognizable human feeling rather than to technical achievement. Dhar appears to have understood this intuitively, investing his most patient craft not in the loudest beats but in the quietest ones. The wager paid off. The crowd came for a spy story and stayed for the people inside it, and those people, played by a cast of seasoned professionals who refused to treat small roles as small, are the reason the two pictures earned the devotion they did. That devotion, sustained across repeat viewings and endless conversation, is the truest verdict on what an ensemble can accomplish when a storyteller takes it seriously.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Who plays Jameel Jamali in Dhurandhar?

Jameel Jamali is played by Rakesh Bedi, a veteran of Indian film and television whose comic timing was developed across decades of work. Bedi was a deliberate choice rather than a marketable face, brought in because the role required a performer who could make warmth feel completely natural without ever tipping into broad clowning. His decision to underplay the humor, to portray Jameel as a man simply enjoying conversation rather than performing for laughs, is the single biggest reason the figure landed so powerfully with viewers. Bedi turns what could have been throwaway comic relief into the emotional anchor of the first film, and his casting is frequently cited as one of Aditya Dhar’s smartest behind-the-scenes decisions.

Q: Why did audiences love Jameel Jamali so much?

The affection comes from a combination of craft and structural design. Jameel is the rare figure in a story full of liars who has absolutely nothing to hide; he is exactly what he appears to be, which makes him a moral oasis in a narrative about the corrosive cost of deception. Viewers cling to him gratefully, much as Hamza secretly does, because he represents the ordinary decency the espionage machine threatens to grind up. His warmth also raises the stakes of the entire mission, since the audience comes to dread what will happen to this kind, harmless man when the truth surfaces. The laughter he generates is real, but underneath it runs a current of dread that makes every moment with him resonate far beyond its comic surface.

Q: Is Uzair Baloch based on a real person?

The figure draws loosely on a real individual of the same name who was a genuine power in the criminal politics of Karachi, but the franchise fictionalizes heavily, inspiring rather than documenting. What the films preserve is the structural truth rather than the biographical detail: that the underworld was never a single unified power but a fractured landscape riven by rivalries between factions and personalities. Those rivalries created the openings through which outside forces, including foreign intelligence, could insert themselves. Uzair embodies that fragmentation. The real history of these criminal dynamics is explored at length in our analysis of the Karachi underworld, which traces how the franchise borrows the shape of real events while reorganizing the specifics for dramatic purposes.

Q: What does Ulfat reveal about Rehman Dakait?

Ulfat, played by Saumya Tandon, is the lens through which the audience sees Rehman as a husband rather than a force of nature. Her presence does not soften him; it sharpens the horror by revealing that the man capable of ordinary domestic tenderness is the same man capable of ordering ordinary death. The discovery that a monster goes home to a wife who knows him as something other than a killer is more disturbing than reassuring, because it denies the audience the comfort of believing that evil is a separate species from ordinary humanity. Tandon plays Ulfat with a knowing steeliness that keeps her from becoming a pitiable victim, suggesting a woman who has made her peace with the violence that funds her life while remaining far more perceptive than the men around her assume.

Q: Who is Sushant Bansal and what does a handler do?

Sushant Bansal, played by Manav Gohil, is Hamza’s field handler, the single thread connecting the deep-cover agent to the agency that deployed him. A handler manages an operative in the field, relaying orders, providing support, and serving as the only point of genuine human contact for someone living a completely false life. In most spy stories the handler is a plot device, a disembodied voice delivering instructions, but the franchise insists on making Sushant a full person who carries the guilt of staying safe while sending another into mortal danger. He is the only human being with whom Hamza can be his true self, which makes their rationed, furtive meetings among the most emotionally charged material in the entire franchise.

Q: Is Shazia Bano’s appearance connected to another film?

Yes. The brief appearance by Yami Gautam as Shazia Bano in the second film is a crossover from her role in the film Haq, and it signals an ambition toward a shared cinematic universe linking these projects. Gautam plays the moment with genuine commitment rather than coasting on recognition, which helps the cameo feel like an intersection of two stories rather than a simple wink at the audience. The appearance functions on two levels: as a storytelling moment that reads credibly even for viewers unaware of the connection, and as a strategic signal of larger franchise ambitions. Whether it works as pure storytelling or leans toward marketing is genuinely debatable, and it is the one supporting element whose justification arguably lies partly outside the immediate narrative.

Q: Why did Aditya Dhar cast comedy actors in a serious spy thriller?

The casting reflects a philosophy that treats every role, however small, as a real acting opportunity rather than a slot to be filled. Several of the supporting performers, including Rakesh Bedi and Gaurav Gera, are better known for comedy and television than for prestige cinema, and casting them in a tentpole thriller is itself a statement of values. Dhar understood that experienced performers could fill these roles completely rather than receding politely into the background. There is also a practical wisdom at work: comic actors often possess exquisite timing and an instinct for naturalism that serves dramatic material beautifully when properly directed. The result is an ensemble where even a figure with a handful of scenes arrives fully formed and memorable.

Q: How is General Shamshad Khan a different kind of threat than Uzair Baloch?

The two figures represent opposite poles of danger. Uzair, played by Danish Pandor, is a volatile street-level rival whose threat is immediate, impulsive, and physical, the danger of a man who might do anything at any moment. General Shamshad Khan, played by Raj Zutshi in the second film, embodies institutional Pakistan, the cold, controlled, state-sanctioned power that operates from air-conditioned offices and issues orders amplified by an entire apparatus. Shamshad never needs to raise his voice because the machinery of the state does it for him. He represents a slower, more strategic threat, the possibility of being identified not by a suspicious neighbor but by a patient intelligence service with vast resources. Zutshi’s stillness makes the General arguably the more chilling of the two, because you cannot punch your way out of a bureaucracy.

Q: Do the same secondary characters appear in both Dhurandhar films?

The supporting ensemble shifts across the two installments in ways that track the franchise’s expanding scope. The first film is dominated by local, street-level figures such as Jameel, Aalam, Ulfat, and Uzair, who make a single dangerous place feel real and inhabited. The second film widens the aperture, introducing institutional figures like General Shamshad Khan while recontextualizing the established players as small figures inside a much larger machine. Some figures are deepened, some recede, and a few are introduced specifically to raise the ceiling on the threat. This deliberate shifting of supporting weight from criminal to institutional Pakistan is one of the franchise’s smartest structural choices, allowing the sequel to feel genuinely larger rather than merely louder.

Q: Is Mohammad Aalam important to the plot of Dhurandhar?

Aalam, played by Gaurav Gera, is not a major plot driver in the sense of advancing dramatic turns, but he is essential to the texture of the world. As a fixer and middleman in the grey economy surrounding the criminal operation, he embodies the ordinary people caught between the underworld and the state, neither hero nor villain, just someone trying to survive an impossible situation. Gera plays him with a watchful quietness and an undertone of suppressed decency that a different actor might never have brought. Through Aalam, the audience understands that the criminal world is not populated solely by monsters and saints but by recognizable people navigating dangerous circumstances. Remove him and the plot survives; the texture and credibility of the world do not.

Q: How does the ensemble respond to accusations that Dhurandhar is propaganda?

The fully realized supporting figures are the franchise’s most effective rebuttal to the propaganda charge, whether by design or instinct. A genuine propaganda film would render the Pakistani milieu as uniformly villainous, a gallery of monsters to be dispatched without complication. Instead, the franchise makes the audience love a Pakistani grocer, understand a crime lord’s wife, pity a middleman, and feel the weariness of a Pakistani general doing his job. It becomes very difficult to maintain a clean us-versus-them framework when the them is composed of people the audience has been made to care about. Whether this is enough to fully redeem the films from the propaganda accusation remains a subject of legitimate debate, but the supporting cast is unquestionably the strongest piece of evidence for the defense.

Q: Who is the most underrated secondary character in Dhurandhar?

A strong case can be made for Mohammad Aalam, whose quiet, watchful survival posture is the kind of work that gets overlooked precisely because it is not showy. Another strong candidate is Sushant Bansal, whose handler relationship carries enormous emotional weight in moments many viewers register only on a second viewing. Both figures do the unglamorous work of making the franchise’s world and its emotional architecture feel real, without the memorable comic flourishes that made Jameel an instant favorite. The underrating is in some ways structural: the figures who generate laughter or menace are remembered immediately, while the ones who provide texture and conscience reveal their importance more slowly, often only when you imagine the films without them.

Q: What does Devavrat Kapoor represent in the story?

Devavrat Kapoor, played by Akash Khurana, represents the political and bureaucratic dimension of the Indian state, the heights from which operations are authorized, funded, or quietly abandoned. He is not a villain in any conventional sense; he is a functionary doing his job, weighing individual lives against considerations of policy and political convenience. The franchise uses him to dramatize the gap between how decisions feel in the office and how they land in the field. A minister can authorize a man’s deployment into mortal danger and then attend a dinner party, while the man so deployed has no such luxury. Khurana plays Devavrat with a bloodless reasonableness that makes the institutional indifference to individual lives far more chilling than any cartoonish betrayal could be.

Q: Why is the relationship between Hamza and his handler so emotionally powerful?

The power comes from the strange intimacy at its core. Sushant is the only person on earth who knows who Hamza really is, which makes their contact both the spy’s lifeline and a source of mortal danger, since every meeting risks exposure. These exchanges are the only moments when the protagonist gets to drop his mask completely, and the franchise rations them deliberately so that each feels like coming up for air. The relationship is charged with everything that cannot be said, with the relief of two people who can briefly stop pretending shadowed by the certainty that the reprieve must end. Manav Gohil plays Sushant with a guilt-laced tenderness, the affection of a man who has come to care for someone the institution forbids him to treat as a friend, and that suppressed feeling becomes the moral center of the institutional side of the story.

Q: How does Dhurandhar’s ensemble compare to other Bollywood action films?

Most Bollywood action vehicles operate on a star economy where the hero absorbs the light and everyone else exists to react, leaving supporting players as interchangeable functional furniture. Dhurandhar rejects this model almost entirely, populating its world with distinct, fully realized individuals who would be impossible to swap between films without notice. This density is what makes the deep-cover premise grip an audience: Hamza is not navigating a few dramatic antagonists but an entire society, any member of which might notice the wrong note that exposes him. The investment in the supporting bench, rather than reliance on the lead alone, is precisely what separates the franchise from its peers and is a major reason the films sustained such extraordinary word of mouth, a phenomenon visible in their record-setting commercial run.

Q: Is Ulfat a villain in Dhurandhar?

Ulfat is not a villain, but she is also not a simple victim, and the refusal to make her either is the source of her power. She is complicit in the sense that she has made her peace with the violence that funds her comfortable life, yet she is also, in her way, trapped within the narrow domain available to a crime lord’s wife. Saumya Tandon holds these contradictory truths simultaneously, playing Ulfat as someone who is at once accommodating, confined, and quietly powerful within her household. She presides over the domestic spaces where Hamza comes closest to mortal danger, and the audience is never entirely certain how much she perceives, an uncertainty that is a genuine gift to the suspense. To label her a villain or a victim is to flatten a deliberately ambiguous and unusually intelligent piece of writing.

Q: What makes Raj Zutshi’s General Shamshad Khan so effective?

Zutshi’s effectiveness lies entirely in restraint. He plays the General with the bureaucratic gravity of a man so accustomed to being obeyed that he never needs to perform his authority. There is no flamboyance, no theatrical menace, only a watchful calm that suggests reserves of force the audience never fully sees but always feels. This is a sophisticated understanding of how institutional power actually expresses itself, through stillness rather than spectacle. The General is frightening precisely because he is insulated from the consequences of his decisions by layers of subordinates who carry them out, and Zutshi communicates that insulation through a controlled, unhurried presence. A loud antagonist would have felt like more of the same; Zutshi’s quiet institutional menace registers as a genuine escalation of the danger Hamza faces in the second film.

Q: Could the Dhurandhar films work without their ensemble cast?

No, and understanding why reveals the central argument of the franchise’s design. Ranveer Singh’s lead performance is largely about concealment, about a spy hiding his true self, and concealment only registers when there are people to conceal it from. Every moment in which Hamza performs friendship, fear, or deference is a moment in which a supporting figure is an active partner in the lead performance, not a backdrop to it. The lead and the ensemble form a single organism rather than separable elements. Strip away the supporting players and you do not get a leaner thriller; you get a hollow one, because the world the spy must navigate would no longer feel real, and a deep-cover story whose world is not convincing has nothing left to be suspenseful about.

Q: Which secondary character is most likely to return in a future installment?

Speculation here is genuinely open, but a few possibilities stand out. The institutional figures, particularly the handler and the political apparatus, are the most structurally flexible, since covert operations naturally recur and the men who manage them can reappear across many stories. The crossover signaled by Shazia Bano’s cameo also suggests that the filmmakers are thinking about an interconnected web of films, which could bring various figures back in unexpected configurations. Beloved figures like Jameel pose a harder question, since their power is tied to a specific time and place in the story, and reviving them risks diluting what made them special. If the franchise expands, expect the institutional and crossover figures to provide the connective tissue, while the intimate, world-building players remain treasured pieces of the original installments.

Q: How much screen time does Jameel Jamali actually get?

While precise figures vary depending on how one counts, the franchise notably invests a substantial block of screen time in Jameel, far more than a conventional comic-relief role would receive. The willingness to devote significant runtime to a figure with no action-hero credentials and no direct role in advancing the central mission is exactly the point of the franchise’s approach. That generous allocation reflects Dhar’s conviction that a spy thriller is only as convincing as the world the spy must navigate, and that the world is built from the people who inhabit it. The time spent with Jameel is not padding; it is the patient purchase of the audience’s belief in Hamza’s cover and the emotional stakes of his eventual betrayal.

Q: What is the best way to appreciate the ensemble cast on a rewatch?

On a second viewing, the most rewarding approach is to watch the supporting figures with the knowledge of where the story ends. Scenes that played as warm or amusing the first time acquire a tragic undertow once you know what Hamza’s deception will cost the people he is befriending. Pay attention to how each introduction establishes a complete person through behavior rather than exposition, and notice how the ensemble shifts from street-level figures in the first film to institutional ones in the second, tracking the franchise’s widening scope. Above all, watch how the supporting players are not reacting to the lead so much as partnering with him, each one giving Ranveer Singh’s concealment something real to conceal itself from. Seen this way, the ensemble stops being a collection of memorable bit parts and becomes the architecture on which the entire franchise stands.