Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In acting, I've found my soulmate.
Filmmaking, it has been my first love.
I am enjoying the abundance and variety of work on the web.
As an actor, it is my job to prepare for the role I am playing.
Women often get ignored from main narrative, especially in films.
The kind of scripts I have read for web shows have been outstanding.
I don't have much foresight, and I think that's an asset for an actor.
I am a serial class taker. I take classes for anything and everything!
Salaam Bombay' and 'Monsoon Wedding' are the two Mira Nair films I go back to.
Of course, I'm open to all kinds of genres. In my head, there are no demarcations.
Infidelity is a fairly common occurrence in society but very often not spoken about.
'Slice of life' is not a genre I had experimented with much, and it's quite difficult.
In the digital space, writers and directors get time to build and establish a character.
If you are true at telling the story, it will get a good audience, and the required numbers.
I think we're still struggling to find a way of depicting women that doesn't objectify them.
There is room and time for multiple tracks to flesh out in the web space. I enjoy this format.
You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.
I think we still have a long way to go in understanding that feminist and femininity are not opposites.
The way you get to explore a city when you are on shoot is so different from when you are there as a tourist.
It was been an absolute joy being in 'The Vagina Monologues' for so many years. I think the play is truly special.
I have been offered roles in mainstream films which have not been interesting to me. They have been too insignificant.
Talking about your work all the time and to open up, you have to do all that. I have begun to find my fun in that as well.
My family moved from Rangoon to Rawalpindi during World War II. My father was born in Lahore in 1946. Those were difficult times.
The biggest quality of good actors is that they know how to respect their co-actors, whether they are as big a name as them or not.
A well-written character is one where you don't know in which direction it's going; the character could spring a surprise any moment.
Very often when we talk about war, conflict or terrorism, we talk about it very politically. We forget that there are people involved.
But, as an actor, the role that I enjoyed, in terms of really understanding and appreciating this profession, was Anoop Singh's 'Qissa'.
Naseer Sir taught me while I was a student at the Film and Television Institute of India. Anything I know about acting is thanks to him.
The problem is never the audience, it has always been the distribution. The digital space is proof that the audience is quite accepting.
It is nice to have a lot of people watch your work but I really have thought of it as not the goal of my career but a bonus in my career.
There are very few parts, and very few scripts, that acknowledge women as sexual beings, or simply just recognise that women have desires.
There's a difference between being a star and an actor. If you feed off from being in the public eye, this is the unfortunate flipside to it.
Film is my favourite without a doubt. I am a film romantic and I love the grandeur of cinema. Dark theatres and big screens are my first love.
I like to watch actors while they are acting, how they hold their attention when so many people around are there to distract them. It's difficult.
When you disagree with somebody else, they often tend to get very defensive. But that doesn't stop me from doing the kind of work that I want to do.
Nothing is more important to me than the work itself. If I feel I am getting swayed too much, I take a step back… My focus is also on the performance.
But having said that, becoming an actor was the best decision I ever made. With its ups and downs and its craziness, nothing makes me happier in life.
I have also done a web show called 'Delhi Police'. It is about the investigation around the Nirbhaya case. It is also very path-breaking and interesting.
As a society, we need to create an environment that encourages women to make the choices that are available to them and encourages them to speak their mind.
It is very difficult to make something like slice-of-life interesting. I don't think many people have done the slice-of-life dramas as good as TVF has done it.
I really enjoy watching animation films and I have always been curious about how such well-established actors in Hollywood lend their voices to animation films.
Whenever I work on a role, I always allow it to subconsciously take me to a place that is magical and unexpected, rather than consciously driving it to a place.
Our family get-togethers are about the stories such as my uncle who walked across the Indo-Burma border, or a woman who gave birth in a ship carrying refugees etc.
The best option that you can have as an actor is pure instinct and you should be able to protect your instinct. Information can either cloud your instinct or aid it.
If the story is insensitive to a person and is not nuanced enough, that's a story I don't want to be a part of. Otherwise there is no other character that I don't want to play.
Because I feel as actors we are required to be vulnerable, it is a part of our job. So the space that you are being vulnerable in should respect that, otherwise it is not worth it.
I want to do roles that are important for the story and not there for ornamental value or to just aid another character in the film which is often a 'friend's role' in mainstream films.
In fact, it is more interesting to play someone whose politics is not in sync with my own politics because then I have to understand a different kind of mind and that becomes more interesting as an actor.
I've been fortunate with the kind of work I've done, in terms of quality. But a lot of work didn't get the kind of release and attention that it deserved. And, I feel little let down by our distribution system.
A good working relationship between an actor and the director is very important. It takes a while to build a comfort zone because filmmaking is a long process so it is important to connect with people you work with.