She’s almost had a second coming in the streaming era, with performances in projects such as Mirzapur, Delhi Crime, Out of Love and the recent Adhura, and Rasika Dugal is excited about the string of projects she has ready to release on the web this year. No wonder she holds the medium as instrumental to her journey.

“The films I did earlier had been beautiful experiences and are irreplaceable for me as a performer, but they were largely independently produced/small-budget projects that would invariably get stuck in the distribution bottleneck,” she tells us.

That would mean those projects would fail to reach the audiences she thought they were meant for. “I feel the streaming space changed that. It gave actors like me an opportunity to do quality work and also access to a wide audience,” she explains, adding that she is glad about the constant evolution the space is seeing, even if at the cost of the pitfalls of experimentation.

“There is so much vying for attention that it is easy for creators to sometimes get swayed by something that gets eyeballs. Despite this, the streaming space stays healthy, competitive and fairly democratic. I am hoping that doesn’t change, and that creative decisions continue to rest with creators and not marketing teams,” she notes.

The availability of long-form content to her as a performer helps the 39-year-old explore a character like nowhere else. “I find the long-form format very enjoyable. The script has luxury of time. One has the space to delve into things, spend more time being the part, understand it better and make changes along the way,” she explains.

Dugal is also happy about the way OTT projects are steering a change in the way women are being portrayed on screen. “Multiple tracks can coexist and, therefore, characters have an opportunity to be well-etched out. I think this luxury of time in a screenplay has also done a huge service to the number of interesting parts for women,” she ends.