Sayaji Shinde birthday: 5 things you want to realize about the Killer Soup actor

As Sayaji celebrates his 65th birthday today, here are five things you need to know about the seasoned performer:

Humble starting points

Sayaji was born and raised in a farmer’s family of the village Sakharwadi in the Satara district of Maharashtra. His first job was as a watchman for Maharashtra Government’s irrigation department for a pay of ₹165 per month.

Marathi theatre

Sayaji pursued acting first through Marathi theatre. He started doing one-act plays in 1978, and went on to get noticed in plays like Zulva (1987), One Room Kitchen(1989) and Amchya Ya Gharat(1991). He then moved to acting in Marathi cinema.

Hindi cinema debut

Interestingly, it was Sayaji’s Killer Soup co-actor Manoj Bajpayee who saw an article on the actor in a leading national daily and recommended him to Ram Gopal Varma. The filmmaker cast Sayaji in his 1999 action crime film Shool. He then went on to appear in Bollywood movies like Vaastu Shasrtra (2003), Sarkar Raj (2008), and Sanju (2018).

South dominance

Sayaji had a career breakthrough with Gnana Rajasekaran’s 2000 Tamil film Barathi, where he played Subramanya Bharathi, the popular poet and and writer from Tamil Nadu. He went on to venture into not only Tamil, but also Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada movies.

Fresh ‘Killer Soup’

On featuring in his most recent series, Sayaji said about “I judge a chief rapidly on what sort of content he has. In any case, Abhishek (Chaubey) is a particularly gifted chief. It was so challenging to pass judgment on him on the grounds that the content kept me snared. Indeed, even after I got back from the portrayal, I continued to ponder the characters. We as a whole understood that it was denser than our creative mind.”