‘I AM A GREEDY ACTOR’
Manisha Koirala, the star of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, remains hungry for challenging roles, but is otherwise happy staying away from the limelight
Manisha Koirala claims she is a slouch on any ordinary day. “I can’t sit upright!” she chuckles. On the other end of the Zoom call, the 53-year-old actor appears relaxed, her hair tied back in a lazy bun, her eyes lled with warm candour behind her oversized spectacles. It is in stark contrast to Mallikajaan, the head of a glamorous house of courtesans in pre-Independence India, the character Koirala portrays in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ambitious project Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar. The web series, releasing on Net²ix on May 1, is her second collaboration with the lmmaker after the iconic Khamoshi: The Musical (1996).
One of the biggest Indian movie stars in the 90s, Koirala has essayed several unforgettable characters in lms like 1942: A Love Story (1994), Bombay (1995), and Dil Se.. (1998). After a tumultuous battle with cancer and a slew of personal issues, she slowed down in the last decade, appearing in only a handful of lms, yet not failing to surprise the audience, as she did with Dibakar Banerjee’s superb short lm in the anthology, Lust Stories (2018). “I want to go beyond what I typically get,” says Koirala of her ambition as an actor. Edited excerpts:
Question: Has your approach to acting changed over the years? Answer: When I was younger and working in song-and-dance movies, portraying the typical Bollywood heroine, I could rely on my instincts and go with the ²ow. If a lm required me to rehearse, I did that. For Khamoshi, I spent a couple of months learning sign language.
Now, I am in that stage where I feel method acting works for me. I want to be mentally, emotionally and physically well-prepared for a role. Since I do not take up many projects now, I have the time to do that.
Q: How did you prepare for Heeramandi?
A: I realised I could not be Manisha Koirala for one bit — I am lazy and tomboyish, and care two hoots about body posture. My whole demeanour had to be dierent. So I took inspiration from my grandmother, a Bharatanatyam dancer, and my mother, a Kathak dancer. Growing up in Varanasi, I have seen many classical dancers and musicians. To become Mallikajaan, I remembered and collected all these details. I developed an emotional, mental and physical language. Sanjay and his team had already created her external world through extensive research. As an artist, I just had to follow his lead and t into that world. Sometimes, he would correct me, “You are not Gayatri Devi, you are the head of the Kotha!” pointing out that I was being too feminine.
Q: In this phase of your career, what are the roles you think of as dicult? A: I love dicult. I am a greedy actor. I want to go beyond what I typically get. I follow world cinema, and when I see a great performance, I think ‘Oh, I want to do that’. In my 20s, I watched one