Yami Gautam on Her Role in Uri: The Whole Idea Was to Keep It Real
After 2018’s Batti Gul Meter Chalu, Yami Gautam is coming back to the silver screen with Uri: The Surgical Strike.
In an exclusive chat with indianexpress.com, Gautam shared that her director Aditya Dhar was very clear about her character from the start.
Even while she was preparing for her character of an intelligence officer, Aditya told her that even if he recommends her to watch movies similar to the subject, she would not find her character externally.
“While we were going through the workshops, I would ask Aditya, ‘What more should I do? What should I watch?’ and he would tell me, ‘You can watch anything. I can recommend you things to watch but you will not find your character externally. You will find it within you. So try to rely on your own instincts and your own understanding of the layers of the character’,” the actor shared.
The film follows the surgical strike carried by the Indian army against Pakistan after the latter attacked the Indian Army camp at Uri. Yami Gautam shared that leaning on her instincts to approach a character was a new experience for her. “As an intelligence officer if I am talking to you, you might think I am just talking to you but I might be thinking about 20,000 odd things. It’s my job, to foresee the unseen,” Yami said.
“It was an interesting approach for me as an actor. There should be no trying too hard to project yourself in a certain way, in terms of your expressions or dialogue delivery. You have to be natural,” she added. Yami further spoke about her performance in the film and said, “There is nothing larger than life about it. The whole idea was to keep it as real as possible. At the same time, there were some lines where I had to be very specific as the information gathered by an intelligence officer is specific and you can’t improvise on that.”