The trailer of Amazon Prime’s first Telugu web series Gangstars , which will go online on June 1, promises a madcap ride featuring 10 oddball characters. There’s a hint of crime and underworld through KD, the character essayed by Jagapati Babu, and features Navdeep and Shweta Basu Prasad as actors. Expect a good dose of fun that unfolds in the backdrop of the film industry.
In Hyderabad for a preview of the web series, Shweta Basu Prasad is quick to clear the air: “In reality I am not at all like the character I portray here.” Gangstars features her as a tantrum-throwing diva, a female superstar used to having her way on the sets. “She’s also bipolar, so it gives the characterisation a different dimension,” she adds.
Shweta was neck-deep with her shooting commitments for the television series Chandra Nandini when producer Swapna Dutt called to talk to her about Gangstars . “I was shooting 25 to 26 days each month and couldn’t think of anything during that time. But Chandra Nandini wound up in November 2017 and I could come and shoot for this web series. We had a ball; the story is a lot of fun and we had fun shooting it too,” she recounts.
Directed by Ajay Bhuyan and written by Nandini Reddy who’s also the creative director of the series, Gangstars was initially meant to be a film. With a great deal of content to be fit into a regular 2.5-hour film, it then took shape as a web series where there’s scope to flesh out the characters and situations better. Shweta asserts, “I am not new to the digital media at all. I’ve been producing and directing short films for a few years now and also made a documentary on classical music (titled Roots) , so I know how different these are from feature films.” She goes on to state that she would love to watch Anna Karenina as a digital series than as a feature film: “It would be far better because a feature film’s length wouldn’t do justice to the detailing in the book.”
She shot for 13 days in the city for Gangstars and credits the cast and crew for a good working camaraderie, “We did a lot of improvisation on the sets. As the series progresses, you’ll also get to see a more humane side to this tantrum-throwing diva character.” The only time Shweta remembers throwing a tantrum was when she was shooting for Vishal Bhardwaj’s Makdee as a child actor. “We were staying in a hotel in Goa where the swimming pool would be closed by 7p.m. I wanted to get into the pool badly and requested if Vishal sir could let me go early.”
Shweta’s line-up of projects includes Tashkent Files co-starring Naseeruddin Shah, Pankaj Tripathi and Mithun Chakraborty, in which she plays a journalist. The film written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri explores the mystery behind the death of former prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri.
(‘Gangstars’ can be viewed on Amazon Prime Video from June 1. The series stars Jagapati Babu, Navdeep, Shweta Basu Prasad, Siddhu Jonnalagadda, Apoorva Arora and others)
