Sameera Reddy was dressed in a skin hugging black pant and T shirt, a far cry from the character of the deglamorized Lakshmi that she plays in the film ‘Red Alert’, along with stalwarts like Naseeruddin Shah, Ashish Vidyarthi, Seema Biswas, Gulshan Grover, Bhagyashree and Sunil Shetty.
The actress is modest enough to confess that though she had rendered a sterling performance as a deglamorized rape victim in Ananth Mahadevan’s ‘Red Alert’, it is not the best performance in her career.
“It is one of the best performances but I want to keep on learning every day as an actress.
"To get into the skin of my character, I had to do a lot of research. Ananth Mahadevan made me read a few books including ‘Red Sun-Travels in a Naxalite Country’ written by Sudeep Chakraborty. I also made it a point to watch a few documentaries on the Naxalite movement, like ‘Running Out of Time’ directed by Abhijay Karlekar. I was amazed by what I saw. It was disturbing to know that a whole lot of Adivasis were displaced from Jharkhand when coal and steel industries came up.”
Sameera confesses that enacting the role of the poor girl Lakshmi, who is raped by the cops, was a different experience for her as an actress, because she had to not only sport a different look altogether, but also act without putting on any make up.
“I had to feel the character and hence, be bereft of the Bollywood style,” Sameera gushes.
Though she admits that the role was different, Sameera concedes that it was not tough. She already had the taste of ‘different’ films with projects like Buddhdeb Dasgupta’s ‘Kaalpurush’ with Mithun Chakraborty and Mira Nair’s ‘Migration’, a film on AIDS.
“It was actually director Buddhdeb Dasgupta who had taught me that I, as an actress, can also do a film other than the routine and typical stereotyped Bollywood films, which do not offer any scope to actresses most of the time”, Sameera says.
She does not hesitate to give credit to director Ananth Mahadevan for her role in ‘Red Alert’. “It was he who educated me on my character. Ananth Mahadevan encouraged me to sit down to work on this character.”
Besides ‘Red Alert’, which had its world premiere six months back in Goa at the International Film festival of India, Sameera is now doing a film in Hindi and Malayalam each.
“I have to buck up for yet another hard hitting role in Nagesh Kukunoor’s ‘Yeh Hausla’ in which I have been pitted opposite John Abraham and a Malayalam film called ‘Oru Naal Varum’ in which Mohanlal is my costar. It is actually my debut in Malayalam. I have already made my debut in Bengali with ‘Kaalpurush’ and have also done a few films in Tamil and Telugu.”
About ‘Yeh Hausla’, she says, “I play the role of a very angry Rajasthani woman who would not even hesitate to dig a sharp knife into the stomach of the guy who crosses her path.”
On lack of awards, she says, “Sanjay Gupta once compared me to Jennifer Lopez as far as glamour quotient is concerned and a filmmaker like Buddhdeb Dasgupta, who cast me in not one but two films – ‘Kaalpurush’ and ‘Voyeurs’, had compared me to Smita Patil. What more could I ask for?”