'My films should reflect my convictions'

After a great run in 2019, Taapsee Pannu is back with 'Thappad' that promises to be a movie with a hard-hitting subject

She has had a great run in 2019. Taapsee Pannu’s Badla, resting on her slim shoulders despite Amitabh Bachchan’s presence, was a super-hit. So was Mission Mangal, in which she was among the ensemble cast in a spunky character. Saand Ki Aankh saw her as a feisty grandmother, participating in a shooting competition,
while the tri-lingual Game Over was about a rape victim, now designing video games, who has to fight unknown forces.

Clearly, in Hindi films alone (the Sikh heroine started out like so many others in the South), Taapsee Pannu has come a long way since her bubbly debut seven years back in Chashme Baddoor. Substantial roles in Baby, Naam Shabana, Pink, Manmarziyaan and Mulk have paved the way for a great and distinctive career, even as she balances the occasional film down south and has a great run here as well.

Having developed a mutual affinity with filmmaker Anubhav Sinha, who moved to content-heavy films with her Mulk, she is back with him in a hard-hitting gender equality subject, Thappad (The Slap), which releases on February 28. Asked how she gets such roles and such films, and she smiles and simply answers, “such roles find me!”

However, there is little doubt that Taapsee is excited about her new film, and when we mention last year’s blockbuster Kabir Singh that showed the hero slap the heroine and her taking it meekly, she agrees that today Hindi films have managed to show both sides of the coin.”Both Thappad and Kabir Singh have the same producers (T-Series Films). But, had I been offered that film, I would have refused it!”

She goes on, “I will tell you why I was not comfortable even watching Kabir Singh. Similar films may have been made in other countries, even in Hollywood, but the impact here in India is different. Over there, the audience do not copy or treat actors as demigods or imitate what we do, whether it is hairstyles or our behaviour. That is why I am wary of doing roles that might have an adverse effect.”

“The problem lies in normalising and celebrating characters like Kabir Singh. There is no retaliation to what he does, when there should be intolerance. I want Thappad to be a film way beyond just as an answer to Kabir Singh.”

As with Mulk, the passion was infectious on the sets of Thappad. “Behind the camera, everyone was having fun, and yet there was a very human level of discussion going on,” Taapsee remembers.

“We all wanted to make things very real. We were too serious and not a single actor was bothered about how much of a role he or she had. They all just wanted to be a part of such a film.”

Taapsee raves about the performances of every single co-actor. What about her own, which has drawn applause even in the trailer? “I never like my own work!” she declares shortly. This is a long-standing Taapsee kink that has no explanation! She puts in a special word for the efforts of Pavail Gulati, who plays her husband.

“We had to get the slapping sequence perfect and the poor guy was so nervous that we had to do seven retakes!” she reveals. “He even asked me to slap him off-camera so that he wouldn’t feel so bad about slapping me!

Pavail ended up slapping me in so many different areas like my neck and finally I told him, “’Just finish it off!’” she laughs.

Ga-ga about her writer-director, with whom she has worked again after Mulk, the actress says, “our thinking is very similar and our relationship is dynamic. I think Anubhav is the best dialogue writer around and 99.9 percent of the time, we both are on the same page about everything.”

Taapsee does want congruence between her beliefs and what a film wants to say.

“It’s like this,” she says. “I finish my work and the film is then for posterity. My kids and maybe their kids will watch it too. So it should reflect me and my convictions. I always ask my directors what is the emotion that the audience should carry home or in their minds after a sequence or a movie. And that is a very important part of the scenes I do.”