Vas Saranga Believes Every Story Begins With Understanding People

By Kyra Greene

Every creative discipline begins with a different tool. A camera. A script. An edit. A performance.

But beneath each craft lies the same responsibility: to understand people.

That idea quietly connects every chapter of Vas Saranga’s career. Long before audiences watched him move between comedy, science fiction, thrillers, prestige dramas, and now I Will Find You, he was making short films, studying editing, thinking about camera angles, pacing, and the invisible decisions that shape how a story is experienced. Today, as an actor, writer, director, editor, photographer, and acting coach, those disciplines no longer exist as separate pursuits. Together, they’ve become a lifelong study of human behavior. GREAY spoke with Vas Saranga about collaboration, representation, creative longevity, and why the most enduring stories aren’t built around plot twists, but around the people who live inside them.

GREAY: You originally set out to become a filmmaker before acting became the primary focus of your career. Looking back, do you think that early desire to direct still influences the way you approach a scene today?

VAS SARANGA: I think filmmaking taught me that acting is just one part of a much larger storytelling machine, and that collaboration with a director is the key to screen storytelling. The way I see it, the actor’s job is to actualize the character, to embody them, and make them 3 dimensional. And it’s the director that helps shape how the character lives and interacts in the story world on a larger scale.

When I was younger, I was obsessed with movies and wanted to direct. I was making short films in high school, editing them, thinking about camera angles, music, pacing, all of it. If anything, understanding how editing works, how scenes fit together, and how stories are constructed has made me much more collaborative as an actor, in helping to create possibilities and options in performance.

GREAY: Your career has moved through comedy, science fiction, thrillers, prestige dramas, and independent projects. What have those different worlds taught you about storytelling that staying in a single lane never could?

VAS SARANGA: What’s interesting is that the surface changes, but the deeper human needs rarely do.

I’ve played characters in science fiction worlds, thrillers, comedies, and dramas, but underneath it all people are usually looking for the same things. They’re trying to belong. They’re trying to protect someone they love. They’re trying to find meaning, purpose, identity, connection.

The genre changes the wrapping paper, but the emotional engine underneath is often surprisingly similar.

Working across different genres has taught me that audiences may come for the thrill, the mystery, or the laughs, but they stay because they recognize and relate to something human.

GREAY: Many actors spend their careers chasing a breakthrough. Your journey feels more like the gradual construction of a body of work. What has a sustainable career taught you that quick success might not have?

VAS SARANGA: It’s taught me that careers are usually built between the milestones, not during them.

We tend to focus on the big moments. The role. The premiere. The breakthrough. But most of a career is made up of ordinary days where you’re still learning, still showing up, still trying to improve.

One thing I’ve learned is that there’s no finish line. Every project becomes preparation for the next one.

I’m grateful for every opportunity I’ve had, but I think longevity has taught me to focus less on arriving somewhere and more on continuing to grow. The work is the reward more often than people realize.

GREAY: You work not only as an actor, but also as a writer, director, editor, acting coach, and photographer. How have those disciplines influenced the way you think about performance and storytelling?

VAS SARANGA: At their core, they’re all about observation.

Photography teaches you to notice details. Coaching teaches you to understand behavior. Writing teaches you to look for meaning. Directing teaches you how all the pieces fit together.

For me, the common thread is curiosity.

The more disciplines I’ve explored, the more I’ve realized that storytelling isn’t really about plot. It’s about people. It’s about paying attention to how people think, how they behave, what they’re afraid of, and how they change.

Everything I’ve done outside of acting has made me a better observer of human behavior, and I think that’s made me a better actor. Even if it just helps me observe my own behavioral patterns and bottle them up for the screen.

GREAY: For many years, representation was often discussed as visibility. Today the conversation increasingly includes authorship, decision-making, and who gets to shape the stories being told. How have your thoughts on representation evolved throughout your career?

VAS SARANGA: When I was younger, simply seeing more South Asian faces on screen felt important because there weren’t many examples.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly interested in who gets to tell the stories, who gets to write them, direct them, produce them, and shape them from the beginning.

Representation is still about visibility, but it’s also about perspective.

The more diverse the storytellers are behind the scenes, the richer and more authentic the stories become. I think audiences can feel that authenticity even if they can’t necessarily explain why.

GREAY: After years of stepping into different lives and perspectives, what do you understand about people today that you didn’t understand when you first entered the industry?

VAS SARANGA: I think I’ve become slower to judge people.

Acting requires you to understand characters who don’t necessarily think the way you do. You spend your time asking, “Why would someone behave this way?” instead of immediately deciding whether they’re right or wrong.

I think the complexity lies in the contrasting elements. When we juxtapose how it seems like someone would behave, versus how they actually do when confronted with a moment they didn’t predict.

Now I look for “what makes this person a walking contradiction” and lean into that.

GREAY: I Will Find You begins with a discovery that forces people to question everything they believe to be true. Why do you think audiences continue to be drawn to stories where certainty suddenly falls apart?

VAS SARANGA: Because I think we’ve all experienced that in our own lives.

Maybe not on the scale of a thriller, but we’ve all had moments where a belief we held about ourselves, another person, or the world suddenly changes.

There’s something fascinating about watching certainty collapse because it forces characters to reveal who they really are.

Harlan Coben’s stories are incredibly entertaining because of the twists, but underneath those twists are people trying to rebuild their understanding of reality. That’s something everyone can relate to.

GREAY: You portray FBI Fugitive Task Force Agent Dev Chopra. Beyond his role within the investigation, what interested you most about him as a person?

VAS SARANGA: What interested me most was that Dev isn’t defined by the pressure around him.

The character description called him “seasoned”, and that really resonated with me. He’s operating in a very high-pressure environment, but he’s spent years doing this work.

What I liked was finding the humanity underneath the badge. There are moments of levity and conversation that remind you he’s not just an FBI agent. He’s a person navigating an extraordinary situation.

I’ve always been drawn to characters who can bring a little humanity into intense circumstances. “Humor and bravery” is what Britt Lower told me she looks for in a character, or project. As soon as I heard her say that, it immediately clicked for me.

GREAY: Harlan Coben’s stories often live in the tension between evidence and belief. As you developed Dev, how did you think about the relationship between what he knows, what he suspects, and what he chooses to trust?

VAS SARANGA: One thing I found interesting about Dev is that he’s constantly operating with incomplete information.

That’s actually true of most people. We like to think we make decisions based entirely on facts, but we’re often balancing evidence, instinct, experience, and trust.

As an investigator, Dev needs evidence. That’s his job. But he’s also relying on years of experience and intuition to make sense of situations that are constantly changing.

I think that’s where the character becomes interesting. He’s trying to stay objective while navigating a world that becomes increasingly complicated, where his own opinions can’t help but factor in.

GREAY: Many thrillers are remembered for their twists, but the strongest ones endure because of their emotional stakes. Beneath the mystery, what do you believe I Will Find You is really about?

VAS SARANGA: For me, it’s about hope.

It’s about what happens when someone refuses to let go of the possibility that the people they love might still be out there waiting for them.

The mystery is fantastic, but underneath it is a story about family, grief, resilience, and the lengths people will go to for the people they care about. That’s what make the twists matter.

GREAY: Looking back, what belief about yourself have you had to let go of in order to become the artist, and the person, you are today?

VAS SARANGA: I think I had to let go of the idea that becoming a great actor meant becoming somebody else.

When I was younger, I was fascinated by transformation. I thought the goal was to disappear completely into a role.

Over time, I’ve come to believe that some of the most memorable performances happen when actors bring more of themselves into the work, not less.

Every character is different, but your own experiences, instincts, sense of humor, fears, and perspective are part of what make the performance unique.

The goal isn’t to erase yourself. It’s to understand yourself well enough to use those parts to actualize a 3 dimensional character, which then helps bring the story world to life for the viewer.

GREAY: When audiences finish watching I Will Find You and look across your body of work, what do you hope they take away from the stories you’ve chosen to tell?

VAS SARANGA: I hope they come away with a greater sense of empathy.

The stories I’ve been drawn to over the years are often about people trying to navigate complicated circumstances while still holding onto their humanity.

Whether it’s a comedy, a thriller, or a drama, I’m interested in stories that encourage us to see ourselves in the characters.

If audiences walk away feeling a little more curious about other people and a little more connected to the human experience, to me, that’s a pretty great outcome.

The longer we spoke with Vas Saranga, the clearer it became that his career has never been defined by genre. Comedy, science fiction, thrillers, and drama may ask different things of an audience, but they all begin from the same place: the desire to understand another human being.

Whether he’s building a character, directing a scene, editing a sequence, coaching an actor, or photographing a stranger, Saranga returns to the same belief—that observation is the foundation of empathy, and empathy is the foundation of storytelling. It’s a philosophy that extends far beyond film and television.

Perhaps that’s why one sentence quietly becomes the heartbeat of this entire conversation:

“Storytelling isn’t really about plot. It’s about people.”

In an industry often captivated by spectacle, it’s a reminder that the stories we carry with us rarely endure because of what happened. They endure because, somewhere along the way, they helped us understand someone else—and perhaps ourselves—a little more deeply.

Photography Vipoositha Gnanenthra @ovyianphotography