Kajol says with time, she had to change her acting style; adds hamming doesn’t go with her acting aesthetics
Titas Chowdhury (HINDUSTAN TIMES; February 24, 2020)

Kajol, who’s basking in the success of Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior, says that she had to change her approach towards her craft a few years back and incorporate a new method of acting in her subsequent films. Looking back at her earlier years in the industry, she says that she had to cater to the demands of her directors and ham in order to play to the gallery as it was the only acceptable way of performing. “We’ve all hammed back in the day. How do you think we would get through? Hamming is terrible. It doesn’t agree with your spiritual, physical and mental aesthetics,” she says.

Ask her what drove this change towards her art, and she says that it’s important to stay relevant to the Gen Z audience, which is now exposed to content from all over the world. “You slowly realise that the audience has also changed. Because of the influx of OTT platforms and exposure to a wide variety of content, you realise that they’re used to seeing better content and so, you have to be better. They know what ‘being natural onscreen’ means. Actors cannot be unnatural now,” she elaborates.

Kajol adds that the process of “loud acting” doesn’t work anymore. “When I did We Are Family (2010), I realised that times have changed, and that formula won’t work anymore. At one point, I realised that a particular scene isn’t working but it would have worked five years back. I understood that somewhere down the line, I’ll have to change my pattern, break it and unlearn everything that I’ve learnt so far or else I’ll expire and become outdated,” says the 45-year-old actor.

For the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) actor, it’s important to appear natural on camera as it never lies. She explains, “I had a moment of epiphany at that point of time. It completely changed my viewpoint about films. I realised that if I want to do more films, I can’t do things where I look at myself and say that things are going wrong. It’s not like you’ll watch We Are Family and say that there’s something wrong with it but when I was doing the film, I figured that it wasn’t working for me, personally. You need to understand what works on camera and what doesn’t.”

Kajol says that social media doesn’t allow actors to fool the viewers anymore. “Today, because of social media, you see actors without any makeup. When you see the same actors with loud makeup and fake eyelashes in a realistic film, it’s going to hit you wrong! If you’re going the ‘realistic film’ way and you still have your eyeliner, eyelashes and mascara on, it’s going to look so wrong. The same applies to clothes, expressions and body language. As actors of a different time and era, we’ve to adapt to the recent times,” she signs off.