The room radiates with her smile and laughter as she enters. Vidya Balan is as excited to talk about Kahaani 2—in which she stars opposite Arjun Rampal, who plays a sub-inspector—as if it were her first one. From a simple woman in Parineeta to a daring temptress in Ishqiya to playing an item girl in The Dirty Picture and a ‘pregnant’ undercover agent in Kahaani, Vidya has done it all. But the actress says there’s more to come.
“It feels so good when directors want me to play a certain role. I hope this never changes. The actor in me is very large and very greedy. I want to play different roles. Human beings are complicated, and the more I get to play such roles, I enjoy it,” says Vidya.
She is unconcerned that her previous films Ghanchakkar, Shaadi Ke Side Effects, Bobby Jasoos, Hamari Adhuri Kahani, Te3n and Marathi film Ekk Albela didn’t do well. She has moved on. She says, “Initially, things were going well and I felt invincible. I felt I could never give flops. I could not accept that my films were not doing well. I thought they would do well after the initial three days. I shot for Ghanchakkar when I was seeing Siddharth Roy Kapoor. We were married when the film released. I blamed myself that it didn’t do well. You become frustrated and you want to blame someone. With time, I realised a film cannot run because of one person and cannot fail because of one person. It’s team work. If you can share the success with everyone, you have to share the flop too. Some films will do well and some will fail. I forced myself to do a few films before Ishqiya and Paa happened. Eventually, I knew I had to do films that make me happy.”
Failure has taught her a lot. “When you are successful, you feel you know everything. With failure, you realise that there is a lot to learn. I enjoyed my success and fame. All that matters is work,” says Vidya.
Explaining the difference between Kahaani and Kahaani 2, she says, “Vidya Bagchi in Kahaani was innocent, you could believe her and wanted to help her. Durga in Kahaani 2, you don’t understand who she is. Is she really innocent or is she confusing? You can’t gauge her. She thinks differently. She is a hill girl and has dry skin. She is not interested in her beauty. She keeps peeling off her skin. Director Sujoy Ghosh instructed me not to pamper my skin or get a manicure. It’s exciting when I have to play Vidya Bagchi, Durga Rani Singh or Bidya Sinha. Your look is a tool to play another person.”
Vidya and Sujoy have a beautiful understanding. “I don’t know if we are friends because we fight a lot. He is very observant and intelligent. For this film, I met him in a coffee shop. I told him, ‘I am an actor’. He said, ‘Oh, are you the one who played the pregnant woman?’”
On her next venture Begum Jaan, Vidya says it was “a completely new experience with Srijit Mukherji. We were supposed to shoot before the rains in Jharkhand. But it had started pouring, and when the sun would come out, it would be hot and foggy or sunny. So we had to shoot fast. We would begin at 4 am. We completed the shoot in 35 days”.
Rajkahini, the Bengali original of Begum Jaan, was much bolder and had a lot of skin show, to which Vidya replies, “I am playing the madam of a brothel. If I am convinced about the character, skin show is just a form of description. I don’t have inhibitions.”
She will start shooting for the Malayalam biopic Aami (‘me’ in Bengali), based on late writer Kamala Das, in December. “It’s titled Aami because she spent her last few years in Kolkata,” says Vidya. “Kamala Das was a wonderful writer and the film has many shades. I was keen to do the role. I was offered Indira Gandhi’s role in a biopic, but since she was a political figure, I asked them to get all the permissions. I was also approached for a biopic on Suchitra Sen, but I felt I was not right one to portray her as Raima, her granddaughter, looks a lot like her,” says Vidya.
Besides acting, Vidya says she nurtures no other talent or hobbies. “I love acting and that’s all I know. I have no other talent. I learnt driving for Te3N. Now I want to learn swimming,” she smiles.