Shweta Tripathi’s character in Laakhon Mein Ek is simple and bubbly, just like her real self. But the actor doesn’t believe in drawing parallels with her onscreen roles. Instead, she tries to live through situations thinking and acting from the character’s perspective.
“I don’t like to relate it to my personal life, because I will end up adding a lot of my opinions based on the situations I have dealt with, which might not be true to the character I’m playing. Laakhon Mein Ek’s Shreya is a young doctor, who is a regular girl from a middle-class family. There are similarities between us, but I didn’t want to approach it that way,” explains the 33-year-old.
Instead, she chose to meet a doctor friend from Delhi to understand the profession and the medical industry. “How a doctor deals with his first patient and the 500th patient is not the same — something outsiders won’t get. When I met one doctor and I spoke about all this, I also observed her body language and clothes. It all rightly added up to Shreya’s character that I was trying to play,” adds the New Delhi-born actor. Apart from doing her own research, she says that the team had a doctor on set whenever they shot a scene that required medical reference.
One in a million
Back with its second season, Laakhon Mein Ek, explores the dark world of India’s medical and pharma industry. The first season was about a young boy who was forced into an IIT college. Created by stand-up comedian and writer Biswa Kalyan Rath, the eight-episode series will have a young doctor (played by Tripathi) starting a cataract camp in a village and the challenges that come her.
No stops, please
Tripathi debuted in the TV industry a decade ago with Disney’s Kya Mast Hai Life as the chirpy Zenia Khan. Her claim to fame is Haraamkhor (2017) opposite actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui, where she plays a 15-year-old girl in love with her teacher. The subject didn’t go down well with the Censor Board of Film Certification and its release was pushed by a year. Undeterred, Tripathi, continued to take up roles in experimental films including Masaan (2015), which dealt with the caste system, and this year’s release Gone Kesh, where she plays an aspiring dancer diagnosed with alopecia. She’s also acted in web series’ like The Trip and Mirzapur.
“It’s not a conscious choice to wait for only experimental films. My main criteria when I read a script, is to see if it excites me and if I think the story needs to be told. With the web, opportunities to explore unspoken topics have increased. But the web is definitely more challenging than films. You need to be good enough to engage the audience for about 10 episodes, unlike a film, where it’s just for two hours,” Tripathi signs off.