She is known as much for her choice of scripts as for her acting prowess. From Qissa and Manto to Mirzapur and Delhi Crime, Rasika Dugal has slowly but steadily built an enviable filmography. However, the actor feels “it has been anything but easy to construct a diverse showcase”.

“There are days when I have to reject work because the scripts are bad. It’s painful to read a bad script because I feel like my sensibilities are getting scarred. If I read five bad scripts, by the sixth one, I wonder whether I am liking it because it’s good or because the five before it were bad. That rattles me a bit,” says the actor, who has diversified her filmography with the genre of horror this time around.

Dugal, who is playing a student counsellor in the Gauravv K Chawla and Ananya Banerjee-helmed series Adhura, says the show gave her sleepless nights as she easily gets spooked. “The last horror film that I watched was when I was 10, and the next one that I saw was Adhura! When I read the script, I thanked the creators. ‘You have taken away my single recourse to fear—switching on lights at night,’” she laughs.

The Amazon Prime Video series, Dugal says, “goes beyond jump scares”. It was an opportunity to explore themes of grief in the garb of a horror show.

“It is a moving story about [everything] that happens in society. The unresolved sadness [in the story] made it harder to sleep at night. One day on shoot, Gauravv said, ‘You are a great horror series actor because you actually get scared, so your reactions are natural,’” shares the actor, adding that she has always been intrigued by horror as a genre.

“I feel it’s an extremely interesting tool through which you can say a lot about your fears. It is about unfinished conversations and unresolved grief. That, to me, is more painful.”