‘Being beautiful doesn’t mean you should not be able to act’
Iranian actor Elnaaz Norouzi continues to get a lot of praise for portraying a bold character in the web series, Sacred Games. However, she admits that there was a lot of advice pouring in from everywhere telling her to be cautious of the role.
“When I started off my career, a lot of people told me don’t do this, don’t do that... you know how it is when you are about to make your first move. I do think it is important to pay attention to that but I also feel that a lot has changed. Right now, in 2018, things are very different from what they were probably a decade ago,” says Elnaaz.
Asked if there were any apprehensions to take up a dark and bold role right in her first Hindi project, Elnaaz explains, “Zoya, my character, is daring, courageous and fearless, and that’s what I loved about it. Even now, people tell me ‘You have such good looks, you are so tall and you can dance, you should do some amazing work in Bollywood’. And I’d be like I want to do characters. Being beautiful doesn’t mean you should not be able to act. That’s what I liked about this web series. She’s not just this actor in this series but she has a background that I have to know and be able to act,” adds Elnaaz.
Having no qualms that her character might typecast her, she says, “I made the right choice because I got to work with such great people, be it the directors (Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane) and actors (Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui). And that means so much.”
She adds, “If I was doing to do this role in any other small film or smaller production, I may have been worried about how they are portraying me on-screen, but I know this is a well-thought-of project and it has a meaning.”