For Taapsee Pannu, her restrained performance in 'Thappad' (2020) was emotionally draining. Almost 15 months on, she has 'Haseen Dillruba' up her sleeve, which sees her Rani as an antithesis to Thappad’s Amrita. “It was liberating to step into the character of Rani. Amrita was suffocating to play because she was controlled from all directions before she [broke] free. Here, she is not the conventionally good woman. I have played roles that aren’t white, but Rani falls in the in-between. I love to portray grey roles,” says Pannu.

The Vinil Mathew film sees her as a newlywed who soon begins a torrid affair with Harshvardhan Rane’s Neel Tripathi. Things take a turn for worse when she becomes the prime suspect in her husband’s murder. It is not surprising that Rani has the rebellious streak of Rumi from 'Manmarziyaan' (2018) — after all, the Netflix film is also written by Kanika Dhillon. “Kanika and I often discuss that we have to genuinely believe what our character is doing, is right. We need to bring honesty to the performance by understanding her ideology and how she feels about her circumstances. We try to do this even when it requires departing from our realities.”

The actor warns that some of her dialogues in the trailer, including one where she refers to her sexual liaison, may be hard to digest for the sexist society we live in. “If some of these lines were said by a man, people would’ve clapped and whistled. But I know the nasty adjectives I will get, and I am ready for them. People will forget that it’s not me on screen, but the character I am playing. But if we demand to be perceived equally, we need to play these roles, which show different shades of a woman.”