Nimrat Kaur is back in an American series. She played an ISI agent in the Emmy Award-winning Homeland in 2015, and is now part of M Night Shyamalan’s Wayward Pines. She decided to do the show while at her sister’s wedding earlier this year. “I had not watched Season one of the series when they approached me in February. I was given the script of the first episode, and I read it through the mehendi session and menu selection,” she says with a laugh, over a call from Vancouver, where the series is being shot. By the end of the ceremony, Nimrat had given her nod to play a part in the science fiction thriller that’s set in a futuristic world.
The series is based on Blake Crouch’s three-part psychological thriller of the same title and executive producer Shyamalan is at the helm of the project. According to the book, Wayward Pines is an idyllic town in Idaho where all its inhabitants are trapped, and have no contact with the outside world. How two secret agents decode the mystery makes the plot. “I am a big fan of the genre. I have watched all of Shyamalan’s movies — The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village and so on, and like them particularly for the emotional connect he brings into the characters, even though the genre is science fiction.” However, Nimrat is yet to meet with the Indian-American director who “doesn’t come out of his city, Philadelphia. He trusts his efficient team with the work, and stays in the loop, remotely.”
For Nimrat, the project comes after the blockbuster hit Airlift , earlier this year. The movie, which is about the evacuation of Indians in Kuwait during the Iraq-Kuwait Gulf war, also stars Akshay Kumar. “It was one of the biggest grossers, but then, I consider it as yet another project for me. Success or not, what’s important is giving it your best.” Having said that, Nimrat also confesses to being extremely selective about the projects she signs. “I do what I feel would be fun to watch, for me. And it is very important that the roles I sign is different from what I have done earlier,” she says. For instance, after Homeland , she did get an offer to act in a big banner series, which she rejected as the role did not excite her. A decision she does not regret, though the particular series “is doing extremely well now”.
Just like her decision to take up The Lunchbox , which brought her to the spotlight in 2015, and the popular Cadbury ads. “My life changed after The Lunchbox . Everybody started recognising me as an actor,” she says. The latest Cadbury ad featuring Nimrat was released a week before The Lunchbox was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2013. “The Cadbury ads were everywhere, and people I met at the festival were like — are you the same girl?”
Wayward Pines Season 2 is a weekly series that premieres on Star World Premiere HD on May 27 at 10 p.m.
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Ticket to Hollywood
Nimrat is part of the bandwagon of actors — inlcuding Aishwarya Rai (Pink Panther), Priyanka Chopra (Quantico), and Deepika Padukone who is debuting with XXX: The Return of Xander Cage — who are making their mark in Hollywood. Among the male actors, Irrfan Khan (also Nimrat’s co-actor in The Lunchbox), Saeed Jaffrey and Om Puri are a few. “It’s a fabulous time for actors working in Bollywood. There is a deep pit of talent here. We have so much to offer, and now people are realising it at a global level,” she says, and adds, “It’s incredible that actors are taking the risk and getting out of the Bollywood circle now.”
