Bilkul Sateek News
By Ajay Verma/Paridhi Dhasmana | 9 August
When Farooq Kabir’s Salakar was announced, viewers braced for a traditional spy thriller anchored by a reliable lead such as Nevin Kastooria. What few expected was that the series’ most arresting force would arrive quietly — in Mouni Roy’s measured, bone-deep performance as Maryam, also known as Shrishti. Her turn, in a role that places an undercover RAW agent in dangerous Pakistani territory, elevates the show from formulaic suspense to something emotionally exacting and memorably human.
On paper, Maryam/Shrishti is a classic undercover construct: deception, danger and the ever-present risk of exposure. On screen, Roy refuses to let the part remain an archetype. She renders the character’s double life with a restraint that foregrounds the psychological toll of espionage — the private anxieties, the constant emotional accounting, the tiny betrayals of self that accumulate into a person. Rather than rely on melodrama or purely kinetic action, Roy makes Maryam’s interiority the show’s engine: a “smouldering concern” in her eyes becomes the performance’s lodestar, signaling a constant, contained volatility.
Technically, the performance is notable for its subtle calibration. Roy balances vulnerability and lethal composure so that the character reads as both fragile and formidable; vulnerability never dilutes agency, and danger never erases tenderness. Sequences that might have been coded as spectacle are instead underwritten, which makes the violent outbursts and moral reckonings that punctuate the series feel earned. The tension between Maryam’s Pakistani cover and her Indian roots produces a quietly powerful conflict — personal desire versus patriotic duty — that Roy inhabits with discipline and nuance.
Mouni Roy herself has described the part precisely: “Maryam is not just brave but complex, conflicted and fiercely resilient,” she said, and the performance bears out that claim. Even after the final episode has aired, the lasting image many viewers carry is not a chase or a reveal but Maryam’s face — taut, watchful, indelible.
“Maryam is not just brave but complex, conflicted and fiercely resilient.”
Seen from a critic’s vantage, Salakar will be remembered less for plot mechanics than for the way it uses a spy framework to foreground character. For Roy, this is more than another credit; it is a transformative role that reframes star power as the impression an actor leaves behind rather than the minutes they command on screen. In that sense, Salakar does what the best spy thrillers occasionally strive for: it hides its weapon in plain sight, and lets a performance do the real detonating.
