Mumbai: Actor Janhvi Kapoor instantly agreed to feature in Zoya Akhtar’s short in the horror anthology Ghost Stories for two reasons: to understand how the filmmaker creates her characters and because she finds herself drawn to ‘slightly tragic characters’.
Zoya’s short features the Dhadak star as a home nurse tasked with taking care of an elderly woman, played by veteran actor Surekha Sikri.
Janhvi has said the project gave her the opportunity to understand the world Zoya creates, which is quite unlike others.
“The way Zoya sees her characters and writes them, they are grounded in reality. They are detailed and never one dimensional, she layers them in a way I don’t think many filmmakers have cracked,” Janhvi stated.” I wanted to be a part of this world and get to know how these characters are made. It was just curiosity,” she said.
The actor said the story and the character resonated with her on a very ‘weird level’. “I think I am fascinated with slightly tragic characters,” Janhvi pointed out.
Calling Zoya an incredible storyteller, the actor says the director, quite meticulously, handed over her a five-page backstory for the character before the film rolled.
“A lot of discovering who my character was also about her physicality – the fact that she was a nurse, there was a certain body language. The way she would dress while working and not working dictated a lot of her intentions. She had a specific way of talking,” Janhvi stated.
The actor was shooting for Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl and Dostana 2 when she landed on the sets of Ghost Stories and was told, last minute, she had to put up an accent for her character.
“Zoya asked if I speak Tamil or Telugu. I said I don’t so she asked me to do an accent. I did one, because my DoP in Gunjan is a south Indian. Zoya was like great, let’s do it. Imagine she is a nurse – an orphan, part of her backstory – who has grown up around those Kannadiga sisters who bring up orphan kids. This happened on the spot! Luckily that day I had only one-two dialogues,” Janhvi informed. The actor then relied on her house help, a Kannadiga, to pick up the specific accent.
Ghost Stories would be Janhvi’s follow-up to her 2018 debut Dhadak. It will stream on Netflix, January 1.
Agencies