Aakanksha picks up the basics of hockey for Clap

‘If you want to learn a sport, learn it early on’, says the actress

I started off at a slow pace. By and by, I increased the intensity before going the whole hog. I now understand how to swing and hold the bat, how to take the stances, how to hit the ball. Hockey is physically and mentally very challenging

Aakanksha Singh, who made a criticallyacclaimed Tollywood debut in Malli Raava (2017), and later played Akkineni Nagarjuna’s love interest in Devadas (2018), will now be seen as a hockey player in the Telugu-Tamil movie Clap. Debutant director Prithivi Adithya has cast Aadhi Pinisetty as the male lead. He plays a sprinter in the sports drama.

“The prime reason why I picked this movie is that I love the way my character is designed. My role has got a proper emotional arc,” reveals Aakanksha. The fact that she has not done a sports drama before was another motivating factor, she adds.

After she signed on for the project, the Badrinath Ki Dulhania actress had to do some homework. We ask her what went into prepping for the tough part and she replies, “I had to learn the sport from scratch. Before the production part was rolled out, the director introduced me to national hockey coaches to help me comprehend the basics. And I trained in the sport for an hour a day for a month in Chennai.”

We ask her how she approached the training. “I started off at a slow pace. By and by, I increased the intensity before going the whole hog,” Aakanksha says, adding that the incremental approach helped her get the hang of the game. “I now understand how to swing and hold the bat, how to take the stances, how to hit the ball. Hockey is physically and mentally very challenging,” she explains.

Playing a sport can be revealing, coming as it does with life lessons. What has Aakanksha realised from the whole experience? “Whatever sport you want to play, learn it early on. As you age, it becomes very difficult and you may have to marshal a greater amount of physical effort,” she shares, and asserts that one has to be mentally very strong while learning a sport.

In Clap, Aakanksha plays a character with two shades. “In the present, I look the way I am in terms of weight. In the flashback episode, I had to look chubby. The director asked me to put on oodles of weight for the part. And, to suit the player’s portions, I had to lose weight,” the actress

“I had to learn the sport from scratch. Before the production part was rolled out, the director introduced me to national hockey coaches to help me comprehend the basics”

says.

The film has an ensemble cast, with Prakash Raj playing the male lead’s father and Nasser in a key role. Krisha Kurup is the other female lead.

Meanwhile, Aakanksha is playing Ajay Devgn’s wife in the Hindi action film Mayday.