Divya Dutta seems to be having a moment with Manoj Bajpayee on screen. Her latest projects, Gajab Raat and Last Man in Tower, see her sharing screen space with the actor, something she says has been a long time coming. “Manoj and I have been in the same films, but we had never shared screen space. The wait has paid its dividends,” she says. Beyond Bajpayee’s charm, Dutta has discovered another talent: his cooking. “He’s cooking for all of us on the sets. It’s delicious,” she laughs.
The 49-year-old actress is drawn to characters who resist easy judgement, women whose choices leave audiences wondering where they stand. In Ben Rekhi’s Last Man in Tower, an adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s 2011 novel, Dutta plays Sangita, a middle-class woman whose instinct for survival becomes entangled with greed. Sangita, Dutta believes, is best left for the audience to judge. “She was happily married, but life dealt her a raw hand. Her dreams remained unfulfilled, her marriage suffered from a communication gap, and she became a caregiver to her child. Somewhere, she forgot herself until she saw a ray of hope.” The challenge was to inhabit a woman who could be both vulnerable and unlikable. “There were times when I wondered if I should take that extra step and make her less likeable,” Dutta says. “I liked her greyness, vulnerability, and how she can turn into something else.”
This ambiguity runs through Dutta’s career, even in small roles. In the 2017 thriller Irada, which won a National Film Award, she brought moral complexity to a woman caught between duty and conscience. In Dhaakad (2022), she played a ruthless crime lord. More recently, in the 2026 series Chiraiya, which confronts the issue of marital rape, she played a middle-aged woman who breaks her silence about the crimes within her own home. Dutta, however, says her career did not begin as she had imagined. “Ideally, I would have loved to debut with a huge hero,” she says. “But things didn’t go as expected. It was an unconventional start, and I realised there were too many multi-starrers in my life.”
She then built a filmography that took her from Train to Pakistan to films with Shyam Benegal and Rituparno Ghosh, while also working with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra and Yash Chopra. Whether playing the heroine or a so-called parallel lead, she gravitated towards characters that are complex. “I had to create my own X-factor to be noticed if I wanted to survive in this industry.”
Dutta sees Last Man in Tower as being as much about the city as it is about the woman at its centre. “In Mumbai and other big cities, the old is giving way to the new. We are constantly running and need to be nudged into slowing down,” she says. “Beyond physical progress, we need to hold on to our emotions, our sense of community and the things our souls need. Cinema helps in this.” For Dutta, a film’s value lies partly in reopening conversations that the rush of everyday life has pushed aside. “A good story is a story about all of us,” she says. “How you perceive it, and how someone else might see it differently, is what makes it exciting for an actor.”