How do you embrace a character you don’t morally align with? That was the big question for Deepika Padukone when she was approached for
Gehraiyaan. The idea, she says, is to leave judgment at the door and be an honest performer. “There will be times when you may not relate to your character’s ideology or actions. But it’s an actor’s job to do the role with conviction, and make the character believable,” begins Padukone, who leads Shakun Batra’s film that stars Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya Panday and Dhairya Karwa.
Padukone essays the role of Alisha, who begins a torrid affair with her cousin’s fiancé. Batra flips love to study the other side of the coin — infidelity, while showing his characters for what they are — frail and flawed. “The one thing I have learnt from this film is not to judge [people] because there is always a reason why they do what they do. The minute you understand the emotion or the thought process behind the action, there is automatically empathy,” explains the actor.
A still from the film
Considering the film has a fair amount of intimate scenes, Batra roped in intimacy director Dar Gai, thus prioritising the emotional well-being of his actors. The move is novel in Bollywood. Asked how it enhanced the comfort of actors, the leading lady says, “The way I view it is: I am doing action in Pathan, so I have an action director. I have a choreographer who teaches me what to do in the songs in Padmaavat [2018]. This is the same thing. Intimacy is often misunderstood as physical intimacy between a boy and a girl, but it’s more than that. There were times when Siddhant and Dhairya had to do intimacy exercises together. Shakun would often be a part of these sessions. The workshops helped [build] a relationship among us. It had a lot to do with trust, which is important in a film like this.”
With the Amazon Prime Video offering, she fulfils her wish of collaborating with Batra. “We met at an after-party in 2015. It’s scary how similar we are in a lot of ways. I was thrilled when he came to me with the story, and our relationship has only become stronger.”
