Vidya Balan on her early struggles as an actress and how it helped forge a bond with her screen alter ego in her next, based on the Mars Orbiter mission
Roshmila Bhattacharya (MUMBAI MIRROR; August 12, 2019)

Today, who doesn’t know Vidya Balan. She is the lovelorn Lolita of Parineeta, the desi siren of Ishqiya, The Dirty Picture’s unabashed Silk, the surprise twist of Kahaani and housewife-next-door of Tumhari Sulu with a call-in-the-night radio show. And these are just some of her screen turns which have made the National Award-winning actress a household name. But there was a time when her aspirations made her cry.

“Coming from a non-filmi family I had no idea how to go about becoming an actress, yet I wanted to be one. It worried my family, though they have always supported me. It must have come as a relief to them when my first TV show, La Bella, shut down after a few months. They must have thought, ‘Chalo, abhi to bhoot utar jayega,’” she reminisces.

But Vidya continued to chase after her celluloid pipedream, despite friends telling her she needed to her studies or at least a back-up plan in plac She did enroll for her Masters to keep herself occupied after some of the offers she had been banking on fizzled out. “It was three years of constant rejections from down South and there were days when I would go to sleep in tears. But next morning, I and smiling, hop something good would happen, and Parineeta did,” she smiles. Perhaps it was her real-life struggle, along with the fact that in the last decade she has spearheaded many films which can get frustrating when things are not going right, that helped Vidya forge an instant connection with Tara Shinde, her character in the upcoming Mission Mangal. The Independence Day-release is inspired by India’s Mars Orbiter Mission which had once seemed like an impossible dream too. “But even when the challenges seem insurmountable, Tara refuses to give up,” says Vidya, pointing to the similarities between herself and her screen alter ego.

You wonder if as a child she had wanted to be an astronaut and reach for the stars, and she laughs, “The closest I have come to that is being on the sets of this film. In fact, I was nervous about spouting all the technical jargon because these concepts were so alien to me. I spent hours reading and watching the videos Jagan (Shakti, director) had given me for my prep.”

Her journey with co-star Akshay Kumar goes back to 2007, Heyy Babyy and Bhool Bhulaiyaa. How much has he changed in the years since, you wonder, and Vidya admits she was thinking the same thing before they started shooting. “But I quickly discovered that the madness is intact, while interestingly, Akshay has reinvented himself as an actor, exploring different genres, moving from action and comedy to socially relevant subjects which he feels strongly about. Which is perhaps why these films are working for him,” Vidya reasons. And for her, how different was it moving from a woman centric film to a women centric one? Vidya is quick to correct you, pointing out that both genders contributed equally to the Mars mission, though the five women, played by her, Taapsee Pannu, Sonakshi Sinha, Nithya Menen and Kirti Kulhari, have a significant role to play in this narrative. “Personally, I like all the girls and the work they are doing. All of us in our own ways are trying to push the envelope and do something interesting,” she avers.

Next up for her is the Shakuntala Devi biopic which kicks soon. Vidya admits that since it was reported that she is doing the film, several people, including her Kahaani director, Sujoy Ghosh, have told her that they had met the mathematician, and all of them have an interesting story to tell about the ‘human computer’. “For me, Shakuntala Devi was just a photograph in the newspapers—her head slightly tilted, a smile playing on her lips and a bindi dotting her forehead. Since I am a South Indian, academics come easily to me, still when I heard the narration, I was left gobsmacked!” she exclaims. Prod her on what impressed her the most, and she says, “She wasn’t only about numbers, she had a wicked sense of humour too.”

There was a time when Vidya was offered as many as eight biopics, but apart from the one on M S Subbulakshmi, which has hit a roadblock, she steered clear of the rest. “It’s not enough to just make a film on an imposing personality. The person should have a story to tell too,” she explains, sighing over the fact that she’d been approached for a Meena Kumari biopic soon after The Dirty Picture, and since their trajectories were similar, she’d turned it down. “Since then no one else has come forward, but I’d still love to play my favourite actress on screen.”

For now, she is working towards resurrecting our former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on screen, after having bought the rights to Sagarika Ghose’s book, Indira—India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister. “The project is not likely to take off soon, it needs a lot of work. The material is vast, Ronnie Screwvala is helping me figure out what we want to tell,” Vidya informs.

The high for now is that after several misses in the early stages of her career, she has just featured in her first Tamil film, the remake of Shoojit Sircar’s Pink. “I worshipped Sridevi as an actress and for the love I have for her and my affection for Boney Kapoor (who produced the film), I agreed to a special appearance,” she points out, as she gets ready to blast off into space with another mission impossible.