R eading Amish Tripathi’s book The Immortals of Meluha changed Divinaa Thackur’s life.
“I loved the character, Sati, in that book. She was powerful, she knew sword fighting and she was heroic.”
It was around the same time that she read in a newspaper that Karan Johar had bagged the rights of the film adaptation of that book. “I badly wanted to play that role,” she recalls, “I wanted to get ready for it.” That meant she had to learn Kalaripayattu, the martial art form. So, four times a week, she’d head to a class and learn the intricacies of the art. “More than the martial arts aspect, Kalari, I found, was very meditative and taught you how to focus.”
It certainly helped her. It fetched Divinaa her first film – Veeram, a trilingual period drama by popular Malayalam director Jayaraj. An adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and inspired by the ballads of Malabar, Veeram was a dream come true for her. “It was a complete package; it had so many factors that attracted me,” says Divinaa, “It had Kalaripayuttu, and I had to use the Urmi sword during the sequences. Also, it was based on Macbeth and I’ve read that work several times.”
Divinaa plays Kuttimani in the film that stars Kunal Kapoor as the male lead. “My character has a lovely graph to her, and is very unlike how I am in real life. I am a very positive person, but my character in my film is a mix – she’s greedy and she loves power. Every time I read my lines, it was emotionally draining, because of the gravitas of the character.”
It would have been easier for Divinaa to do a regular Bollywood film, but the challenges (“learning the Malabar dialect and putting on eight kg”) in Veeram drew her. “As I’ve done many commercials, I have been offered films before. But they’d mostly be blink-and-miss roles. I love acting and I think that’s what Jayaraj sir saw in me. The first time we met, we didn’t even discuss Veeram . We ended up discussing world cinema and Akira Kurosawa’s works,” says Divinaa, who idolises Meryl Streep.
Even as she awaits the release of Veeram , scheduled for next month, Divinaa is working on a web-series by Balaji Telefilms. “In that, I play a college girl who is very chirpy — a complete contrast to what I played in Veeram . I’d love to do a rough-and-tough biker someday in the future.”
