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For someone who packs as much into his day as Ritwick Chakraborty, punctuality often comes at a premium. At present, He has three films running simultaneously in the theatres but he hasn’t developed starry bad manners, doesn’t consider being late fashionable and still apologises if he is.

Now he is on a short break after 50-odd days of non-stop work. “There was a one-day gap between shooting Pratim D. Gupta’s Saheb Bibi Golaam and Mainak Bhaumik’s Chalachitra Circus, but I had a stage show that day,” he says.

It has been an epic run for the actor. The three movies in the theatres include Utsav Mukherjee’s Bheetu (‘Coward’, a psychological thriller), Arindam Sil’s Ebar Shabor (a detective story) and Anindya Chatterjee’s Open Tee Bioscope. And about to release is Sudeshna Roy-Abhijit Guha’s Bitnoon.

If that’s not enough, Chakraborty has finished with shoots for no less than six films that are to hit the theatres this year (Apart from Saheb Bibi Golaam and Chalachitra Circus, there’s Nirbaak, Daaker Saaj, Anubrata Bhalo Achho?, and Cross Connection 2. Their directors are Srijit Mukherji, Somnath Gupta, Partha Sen, and the Sudeshna Roy-Abhijit Guha duo, respectively).

Then, for TV, there was Aparna Sen’s Saari Raat, part of a project commissioned by a Pakistani TV channel that includes six films by Pakistani directors and six by Indian ones including Tigmanshu Dhulia and Anurag Kashyap. Evidently, Chakraborty is in demand.

Later this month, he will be off to Mumbai for the summer to shoot director Bauddhayan Mukherji’s The Violin Player, that’s about a day in the life of a violinist who trained under Ustad V.G. Jog but never made it to the big time and got lost in the crowd of musicians playing background scores. For this role Chakraborty is learning to play the violin. “It is very difficult,” he says, though he’s determined that his left hand should be in the right places. Chakraborty doesn’t want to make any mistakes — especially as Mukherji had decided to shelve the project itself if Chakraborty wasn’t available.

And once he is back in Calcutta later in the year, there’s more work lined up. “Talks are on for three or four projects with directors such as Raj Chakraborty and Kaushik Ganguly,” he says, declining to reveal more.

But things weren’t like this till even a couple of years ago. Chakraborty’s turning point as an actor was being cast as the protagonist, Tarak, in Ganguly’s Shabdo (Sound), which released in 2012. “It was Churni (Ganguly’s actor and director wife) who insisted on Ritwick for the role,” says Ganguly. The film was a hit and established Chakraborty in cinema. So much so, that over the next two years, a dozen films featuring him have hit the screens and he has given up acting in television serials.

Raima Sen was already a star when she was cast opposite Chakraborty in Shabdo. She remembers Chakraborty as a quiet person, who did not talk much but was very sincere about his work. What, she says, struck her even then, was the fluidity of Chakraborty’s acting and the fact that he slipped into his role totally and “became Tarak”.

Similarly,  Parno Mittra, Chakra-borty’s co-star in the recently released Bheetu, openly admits to being his “fan girl” and is impressed by the conviction with which her co-actor played her stalker in the film. Besides, she says, “he is so grounded!”.

Filmmaker Aditya Vikram Sengupta was probably looking for such a quality in his lead actor for Asha Jawar Majhe, a film without dialogue that’s scheduled to release in theatres this year and which has been invited to 40 film festivals the world over — probably the biggest Indian success in the festival circuit in recent times.

“He (Sengupta) knew what he wanted and I just had to deliver,” says Chakraborty simply. Sengupta says there would sometimes be 25-30 takes for a shot, and initially he was worried that Chakraborty might not agree to do so many. “But he (Chakraborty) was always willing,” says Sengupta.

Chakraborty believes an actor like him wouldn’t have been needed if Bengali films had remained as formulaic as they had been during his youth. The change, says Ganguly, was triggered by the Bengali telefilms that hit the small screen towards the late 1990s and their popularity gave directors and actors the confidence to try out new and different themes and stories in the bigger format too. Today even established stars are appearing in more offbeat roles. The result is the rise of actors such as Parambrata Chattopadhyay, Saswata Chatterjee and, of course, Chakraborty.

The line between commercial and independent cinema has also become blurred. “A film has to eventually make money to be a commercial success and many of the independent films have done that,” says Sen, who has acted in both kinds.

Although he quit TV to devote more time to cinema, Chakraborty went back to the stage a year ago after a gap of about nine years. He is the protagonist in Ke? (Who?), a thriller being staged by director and playwright Bratya Basu’s Kalindi Bratyajon. It is 39 shows old now. “The problem was finding the block of dates for the rehearsals,” says Chak-raborty, “finding time for the shows isn’t difficult.” In his early days, after he had chucked up his job as medical rep and was dabbling in a number of businesses Chakraborty had joined theatre group Avash before he moved on to scriptwriting and television serials.

On the personal front things have changed too. In 2011, he married actor Aparajita Ghosh Das, who he met around 2004 when he was a scriptwriter for TV and they have co-starred in films such as Ek Phali Rodh and Chalo Let’s Go. Their son, Upamanyu, is now a little over a year old and Ghosh Das has gone back to work. A few days ago Chakraborty was out looking for a reliable nanny for his son to fill in for the regular one. And he is trying to spend as much of his break as possible with his son before he goes off to Mumbai.

Today, Chakraborty has his hands full. So, why has he gone back to the stage when he gave up working in TV serials? “It is that two hours of unbroken immersion in the character and, of course, the connection with his audience” that he loves. And it is probably that same need to connect to people that enables him to remain the guy next door.