The actress on playing a real-life Brit secret agent in Emmy Award-winning director Lydia Dean Pilcher’s espionage drama
Akash Bhatnagar (MUMBAI MIRROR; July 27, 2019)

After making her Hollywood debut with The Wedding Guest last year, Radhika Apte is now gearing up for Liberte: A Call To Spy which premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last month. The espionage drama, directed by Emmy award-winner Lydia Dean Pilcher, has the actress playing Noor Inayat Khan. Describing her character as “a pacifist fighting in the war”, Radhika informs that she was a Brit born in Russia to an American mother and an Indian Muslim father who was into Sufism, and raised in France.

During World War II, Noor who was part of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s secret organisation was sent to France as a spy and operated under the name of Madeleine. She was caught but did not reveal secrets, and died, her last word being, “Liberte.”

Radhika met Lydia at the Tribeca Film festival in 2015. The latter was on the jury and she’d won the best actress award for Clean Shaven, part of the anthological film Madly. “Lydia told me that she was casting for this film,” she recalls, admitting a lot has been written on Noor, including stories by her children and material from secret services. “With Lydia’s help, I was able to find a balance between all the information and finding the character,” she says.

The actress points out that when we talk about wars, we only speak about the men. “But there were so many women who fought just as valiantly. Lydia feels very strongly for them and wants to tell their untold stories,” she adds, agreeing that while we’ve seen many films on the World Wars, they always felt distant despite being directly related to India’s Independence struggle in many ways. “I never thought I’d get an opportunity to portray someone involved with a World War. Being on the set of Liberte, wearing those costumes, was an experience.”

Prod her on differences between our industry and the West and she quips, “People there are more professional in terms of punctuality, be it coming for a shoot or paying your dues.”

Radhika hints to an announcement for another international film but is waiting to sign it first. Meanwhile, she’s been embroiled in a controversy over a leaked scene with Dev Patel from The Wedding Guest. She clears the air, saying, “I never gave any interview in this matter” and adds with a laugh, “How many times is the audience going to get surprised by my nudity?”
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Dhaval Roy (DNA; July 27, 2019)

It’s cloak and dagger time for Radhika Apte as she is all set to be seen in Liberte: A Call to Spy. Based on true incidents from World War II, the Hollywood project has the AndhaDhun star essaying the role of a British spy, Noor Inayat Khan aka Nora Baker, who was the first female wireless operator to parachute into Nazi-occupied France to help the French Resistance.

Needless to say, to portray her part, Radhika had to do big-time research and rehearsals. The actress shares, “I believe that preparing for a character includes almost all aspects of acquiring knowledge — information about the subject, reading up extensively about the story in question and even related stories that influence my character, balancing out the visceral side of her, so on and so forth.” Hence, she pored over a number of classic novels and watched spy flicks to get into the skin and psyche of the character. “A lot of reading material was passed onto me by writers and producers on-board,” she adds.

As for the difference between the process of filmmaking in the two industries, she says it’s an extremely subjective process. “I think every director and production house has their own way of working.” However, she did notice two things that set Indian and international filmmaking apart. “People are very punctual there. And they pay you on time. You don’t have to beg them for money.”

A source also tells us that apart from Philadelphia, where the production designers recreated England, the team also filmed in Budapest, where Radhika has visited as a tourist in the past. “She had a great time while working there as well,” the insider said.

BOMBAY TIMES (June 23, 2019)

Radhika Apte will soon be seen essaying a British spy in her forthcoming Hollywood film Liberte: A Call To Spy. The actor headed to the UK on Friday for the premiere of her film at the Edinburg Film Festival. She also shared a picture with her co-stars from the festival.

She recently shared her look from the film, alongside a picture of the real Noor Inayat Khan, a spy during the World War II. Also known as Nora Baker, she was the first female wireless operator and a British spy who parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to aid the French Resistance.

The forthcoming film based on true incidents is set 75 years ago during the World War II, when Winston Churchill creates a spy organisation, SOE, in order to disturb the Nazi war machine. The newly-created spy organisation recruits a female spy lead, Vera Atkins (Stana Katic), who further hires two unusual candidates: Virginia Hall (Sarah Meghan Thomas), an ambitious American with a wooden leg, and an Indian, Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte), a Muslim pacifist. Together, these women build a new spy network to stop Hitler.