‘I switched off my brains’

Taapsee Pannu shares the challenges of working in Raghava Lawrence’s horror-comedy, now a runaway hit in Telugu and Tamil.

May 07, 2015 08:40 pm | Updated 08:40 pm IST - HYDERABAD

Taapsee Pannu

Taapsee Pannu

Taapsee Pannu is beaming and doesn’t hide it. “I’ve been waiting for this phase of my career for a long time. Last year, I had no release in Telugu, Tamil or Hindi. And this year has been good so far with Baby , Kanchana 2 ( Ganga:Muni 3 in Telugu) and Vai Raja Vai (Tamil). I am not surprised that these films are hits but I am shocked how huge they’ve become,” she says.

Nothing prepared her for working with choreographer-turned-director Raghava Lawrence. “When he first approached me, I said no even before going through the script. I didn’t have faith; faith that I could pull off such a character. He persisted and I asked him for a month’s time to think,” she says.

A month later, Lawrence called and asked her ‘Now what?’ She was still unsure, scared. She relented when she realised he had faith in her. “He told me this film will be handled differently from the previous ones in the series, Muni and Kanchana . I switched off my brains, listened to his instructions and followed them blindly. I still cannot relate to characters that are possessed. I am extremely scared of horror films and don’t watch them,” she says.

The film required her to play a regular young woman in the first half and later, a woman possessed by spirits. “That was tough. I am not as comfortable with Tamil as I am with Telugu, so it made it a notch tougher. And I am not the kind of actress who would say ‘a,b,c,d,1,2,3,4’ in place of my dialogues. I’d rather learn my lines and understand what the words mean,” she says. Taapsee is candid enough to admit that she needed “countless takes” to get a few scenes right.

Each time she begins working on a film, she says, she prefers to start on a fresh note. “I am not a trained actor. Each director and unit has a different working style and I look forward to learning from them,” she says.

Taapsee has also been signed up for director Selvaraghavan’s forthcoming film with Trisha. “It’s an action-oriented film and I am hoping that the martial arts I learnt during Baby will come in handy. I need to work on my physique to look like someone capable of performing stunts with ease. We begin shooting end of this month,” says Taapsee.

In the meantime, there is the Hindi rom-com RunningShaadi.com with Amit Sadh waiting to release and Agra ka Daabra with Ayushmann Khurrana. For Agra ka Daabra , she is learning Urdu. “I have realised that I need to prepare while accepting certain projects. You can do regular masala films without much homework but films like Baby or Agra ka Daabra need effort. We went through a workshop for Baby , which was immensely helpful. Otherwise, I’d end up looking and sounding the same as I did in my earlier films and people will get bored of me.”

There’s also Tamil director Thiru’s film with Jay, Samuthirakani and Sonia, in the pipeline. If there is no Telugu project in her roster as of now, she says, “Nothing exciting has come my way from Telugu recently. Maybe they feel I can’t deliver something different from what I’ve done before, I don’t know.”

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