Actor Radhika Madan asked for the question to be repeated. This time around, she peeled her eyes off of the recorder – “it’s so old-school!” – to return to our tête-à-tête. But as director Homi Adajania kicked off his interview, he mischievously chuckled and eerily predicted its malfunctioning. During their chats with The Hindu at the Santa Cruz West Maddock Films office, the actor and director discussed their upcoming film Angrezi Medium ( AM ), being storytellers, and their peculiar career trajectories.
After playing a badass martial artist in Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota and one half of the warring Rajasthani sisters in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Pataakha , the 24-year-old Madan will be portraying a 17-year-old Tarika Bansal, the daughter of an Udaipuri mithaiwala (Irrfan Khan) who wants to study in London.
While there were whispers of Madan replacing a star kid for the role, Adajania shared he happened to chance upon her audition for Pataakha , “I had no clue who this girl was, but I was blown away by it.” As they discussed it, Madan asked to audition for AM , but Adajania seemed rather blasé having decided he was looking for a 16 or 17-year-old. “I saw her audition and there was no way I could say no,” he said, admitting that she didn’t stick out amongst a group of younger teenagers.
Out of character
Madan felt that playing Tarika has been her toughest role yet. She rolled her eyes, knowing that people would likely disagree, “But I can’t relate to Tarika at all. I think the one thing that’s common between us, is that we can’t stop dreaming.”
In her endeavour to get into the schoolgirl’s shoes, the actor travelled to Udaipur, and spent time with teenagers who were giving their exams. “They would pick me up in their Scooty and go to their hangout spots – [near] Fateh Sagar [Lake] we would have kulhad-wali chai (tea in clay cups).” They spoke about boyfriends and travelling abroad, and Madan picked up the nuances and twangs in the English they spoke. But the actor shakes her head defeated while laughing and added, “All people are going to say is, ‘she looked cute and sweet!’”
With her two-year-old career in Hindi films, Madan’s filmography has almost caught up with Adajania’s – whose presence in the industry was marked with his 2006 debut, the Saif Ali Khan-starrer Being Cyrus . But the director is unbothered by the gaps between his releases – his last being the 2014 Finding Fanny . He shared that he takes on projects instinctively, “I make a film if I know it’s going to be a new and great experience [that will] put me out of my comfort zone. I made my first film because I didn’t know how to make a film. I made Cocktail (2012) because it was just not [of] my sensibilities and I thought ‘let me try this’. I made Finding Fanny because I wanted to make a picture book on love, loneliness and longing, and I wanted each frame to be edible.” On him why he chose to helm AM he said, “Because I’m looking at the world around me and I feel we need to make people laugh. [Not through] gags or slapstick, [but the film] needed to have a soul.”
An adventurous life
Adajania also admitted that inevitably, experiences from his travels – whether the people he meets, or the bizarre experiences he survives – bleed into his films. When asked for a list of the craziest situations he has experienced, the effort to shortlist was evident. He mentioned being on a boat for a shark expedition that hit rocks and sank at 3 a.m., doing a diving course in Mauritius when he ran out of air at a depth of 120 feet, and going snowboarding – when he didn’t know how – before he had his first child, but landing up with a ripped collarbone and snow blindness. But he left it that, flustered that the 20 minutes allotted for the chat wouldn’t allow him to dive into detail of each story.
Director Homi Adajania
While Adajania decided to create Being Cyrus on a whim – just another thing to check off his bucket list, Madan’s beginnings in the industry were also rather accidental. After being discovered on Facebook, Madan took a leap of faith and moved to Mumbai to act in the television show Meri Aashiqui Tum Se Hi and it was after four months of its shooting through long hours that Madan discovered a love for acting. Despite the condescension small screen actors often face, Madan sees her background and its rigorous schedules as the place she learnt to hone her craft. Two separate accidental injuries with her dog – a burn and a bite – didn’t stop the show’s shooting. “They came home and took my close-up. Once I was bitten by my dog [around] my eye and they changed the script – the next day I had a kidnapping scene and got hit, so I shot with a bruised eye,” she shared.
Madan will next be seen as a swimmer in Shiddat opposite Sunny Kaushal while Adajania is working on his first web series Saas, Bahu Aur Cocaine about women who run the biggest cocaine cartel in South Asia from a crumbing haveli in Kutch. Both are focused on steeping themselves in new experiences. As Madan succinctly concludes, “I don’t want to get bored. I want to live different lives.”
