Anjali Patil, the actor who was last seen in Rajesh Touchriver’s heart wrenching movie Ente about a girl who gets caught in a sex trafficking racket is back. Anjali who won the Silver Peacock award for Best Actor Female at the International Film Festival of India 2012, Goa, for her stellar performance as a broken woman in With You, Without You , plays the female lead in Shree , a science fiction thriller by debut director Rajesh Bachchani, which hits theatres on April 26.
The dusky beauty plays Sonu, a bubbly, intelligent chatterbox of a girl who is possessive of her man played by popular Hindi serial artiste Hussain Kuwajerwala in Shree . “ Shree is perhaps one of Bollywood’s first sci-fi movies. It is heavy on computer graphics. It was really cool shooting for the movie as we had shots against green screens and at times, we had no idea what the scene being shot was. Seeing the end result was amazing. Playing Sonu was fun; she is very much a today’s girl. She is a dreamer; she dreams of getting married to her boyfriend. She is different from my roles in Chakravyuh and Delhi in a Day . If the character I played in the former was violent, the girl I played in Delhi… is timid,” says Anjali who is currently shooting in Bhopal for Prakash Jha’s Sathyagraha . “It’s only a cameo role,” she says.
Asked if winning a prestigious award has helped bring in a line of interesting roles and the actor says: “Not really. People feel that that I will only be interested in serious roles just because I am an award winning actor. I would like to do a pure commercial movie. I like experimenting with roles. It can be anything: a simple girl with a simple story to tell, a tale of a girl gone wild, a completely nonsensical role…”
So, apart from Shree and Sathyagraha , are there any other movies in the pipeline? “I am reading a couple of scripts but nothing has been finalised as yet. I am going with the flow.” And what about theatre? Replies the alumna of Centre of Performing Art, University of Pune, and National School of Drama, New Delhi: “Well I have been watching a lot of plays and I do hope to conduct a weekend workshop for theatre lovers soon.”
