It’s around lunchtime and Bejoy Nambiar’s third shooting schedule for his Malayalam-Tamil film Solo (starring Dulquer Salmaan), is underway in Kochi. Dhansika, playing the role of a visually-challenged dancer, gives exactly five minutes for a phone interview. She says she cannot reveal more about Solo , which also happens to be her Mollywood debut.
Dhansika is, however, upbeat about two of her projects that are up for release — Sinam and Enga Amma Rani . The first one, part of a series of three short films, is set in Kolkata, and Dhansika plays a sex worker. “It’s a bit more than that, actually,” she says. “My character is a Madurai girl who elopes and gets married to her lover, but is forced into prostitution by her own father. So, she plans to take revenge.” The film, made by Anand Murthy, shows Dhansika’s character narrating her story to a documentary filmmaker. What was most challenging and interesting for her was delivering a 11-minute monologue with varied emotions.
What is Dhansika’s acting process when she is handed a script? “I just go with the flow. Half of the getting-into-the-character routine is done once I land on the sets and start shooting. I don’t even know what terms such as method acting mean.” Dhansika was only 19 when she entered the film industry. “She was always the silent girl,” her uncle, who is also her manager, says. “So silent, that one of her teachers thought she was speech-impaired and called her parents.”
Dhansika was born in Thanjavur and her family of four (mother, father and younger sister) was constantly on the move, in search of better prospects. As a result, she ended up studying in different schools year after year—including a boarding school in Uthukottai. It was only during the early 2000s that she chanced upon a film exhibition at the Nandambakkam Trade Centre in Chennai. Director SP Jananathan, who was making Peranmai , required an athletic girl for one of the supporting roles. Dhansika found herself to be the perfect fit, because she involved herself in every sport possible during her school days (“basketball, volleyball, throwball ... you name it!”). And, that’s how she got to play her very first role of Jennifer, for which she also learnt silambattam . Since then, it has been a careful selection of scripts.
Her next film, releasing on May 5, is Enga Amma Rani, directed by S Bani. She plays a single mother raising two daughters in Malaysia. Dhansika says she took it up as she found the script very powerful. Her only suggestion was that the children should be much older than three or four as was originally written, so it would be not be hard for them to emote.
Though she has essayed roles under directors such as Vasanthabalan ( Aravaan ) and Bala ( Paradesi ), one cannot help but ask Dhansika if she gets tired of being identified as Kabali’s daughter. With a laugh, she says: “May be, it did earlier. It doesn’t affect me much now.”
