As Urmila Matondkar’s Kaun? (1999) completes 25 years this year, the actor would like the film to have a re-release so people can enjoy it on the big screen, instead of their phones. Feeling nostalgic, she says, “It was a bunch of crazy people coming together, and I must have been the craziest of them all.”

Directed by Ram Gopal Varma, the film also starred Manoj Bajpayee and Sushant Singh. She was offered the film after establishing herself as the “Rangeela girl” in 1995. So, as an actor who had created an image for herself with “glitz and glamour” roles, taking up a horror film was a “major risk for both me and the makers”.

She adds, “Since Manoj and Sushant were comparatively newcomers, they didn’t really have as much to lose like I did.”

The psychological thriller was experimental, admits the 50-year-old: “We hardly had films in one closed space, actors in the same attire and in restricted frames.”

While the film had a mediocre run, Matondkar’s performance set a benchmark in the horror-thriller space in India. However, unlike today where film scripts are fixed in advance, the actor says, “There was no bound script. The film was being written on set and the makers would see how things unravelled as we performed.” She went on to act in several other horror/thriller movies like Deewangee (2002), Bhoot (2003), and Ek Hasina Thi (2004), among others.

This means she also had a lot of creative freedom on set to add nuances and make changes to her character at the last minute. “During one scene, I thought, ‘What if I don’t use the knife and just let my eyes do the acting before the dagger comes into the frame?’ When the camera rolled, my spot boy dropped everything he was holding and that’s when I realized I had nailed it,” the actor signed off.