Essaying a farmer's role in a movie after playing a flamboyant superstar in another film led actor Pankaj Tripathi to a bit of physical transformation.

Soon after wrapping up the biopic Shakeela in Bengaluru, Pankaj was asked to shed some weight to look like a farmer from a small town of Uttar Pradesh for his next film Kaagaz, written and directed by veteran Satish Kaushik.

The actor says he had received a brief on the character that he is supposed to play and accordingly he prepared himself to look a bit similar.

Recommended Read: India’s narrative can’t be reduced to one colour: Mahesh Bhatt

"My look will be different in Kaagaz. After finishing Shakeela, I didn't get much time to prepare myself to play Bharat Lal. So, practically whatever time I got in my hands, I prepared myself to look like a farmer from a small town. Instead of hitting the gym, I took to the organic way to lose my weight.

"On the sets of Shakeela, I was sipping warm water with honey and lemon juice. I also cut down oily and junk food and had small meals in between shots. I also avoided taking shade under the umbrella and stopped wearing sunglasses to tan myself under the sun organically," Pankaj said in a statement.

Kaagaz is a real life tale of an innocent farmer from Bihar who was, through bribery, declared dead in his town's official records by his relatives to illegally capture his land. He had to then fight with the Indian bureaucracy for 18 long years before he could prove himself to be alive.