‘I like to play women who have a voice, or find their voice’

Shweta Tripathi started out as a photographer and decided early on to seek out subtlety, use different lenses, and help others see the world as they might never see it on their own. Now an actress, she says she doesn’t see greys. She seeks out colour.

Tripathi, 36, got her start in TV in 2009, and has sought out projects that let her play colourful characters ever since. She shot to fame with Masaan (2015), where she was an upper-caste Hindu girl in love with a lowercaste boy; co-starred alongside Vikrant Massey in the sci-fi/dark comedy Cargo (2019), about the crew on board a spaceship collecting the souls of the recently deceased. And did a turn as a bit of a villainess in Mirzapur (2018), where she plays a bookish college student who turns into a gun-wielding avenger. “I did season one so that I could play Golu in season two,” Tripathi says.

What she loves about acting is that it’s a life in which “you get to feel so many emotions”. Excerpts from an interview.

What’s your process? How do you prepare for a colourful role?

For season two of Mirzapur, when Golu’s world fell apart, I decided I wanted her to be physically fit. I wanted her to look like a girl who could pick up a gun when needed. Then I did something that I do for all my characters, I created a playlist. It puts me in the right mood.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for was how hard it would be to get out of character, especially a dark character like Golu, who doesn’t have a good day in season two. I had to fool my body into believing that I was in trouble and that was very difficult to disconnect from. Now, every time I play a character I know that I will give a part of me to the character but I will also take a part of the character with me. That helps me grow.

What draws you to a role?

I am attracted to parts where women have a voice, and if they don’t, they find it. And I never repeat a character. Right now I’m shooting for a comedy for the first time, a feature film called Kanjoos Makhkhichus with Kunal Kemmu and Piyush Mishra. After this I will be playing an acid-attack victim. I know it will be extremely difficult because the research involved talking to survivors about what happened and the role involves trying to reflect something of what they felt. The woman I play is a complex character too.

What’s your take on the relative murkiness, or the many shades, as you would put it, of today’s heroines and heroes?

Once upon a time in Hindi films, the hero and heroine couldn’t do anything wrong.

But that is not how society is. It’s like thinking, as a child, that your parents are perfect. At some point you realise they are human, with flaws, capable of doing wrong.

I’m thankful to OTT platforms for making lead characters more real and more relatable. Like in Laakhon Mein Ek (2017), where I play Dr Shreya Pathare, who gets a posting in a rural area. She is not happy. She’s worried about the living conditions, food, washrooms. The OTT platforms have made room for people who are full of colours. The audience gets to see that, as in real life, when you put a person in a corner, he or she will retaliate, which doesn’t automatically make them a monster.

What would you like to see next, when it comes to how women are portrayed on screen?

I don’t want women characters to shy away from showing sexual desire. I want to see women making their own choices – whether to be a homemaker, a doctor or a mafia queen. I want the audience to get out of the deep conditioning of putting women in boxes. The responsibility falls on the actors too, because we too are responsible for the stories we put out.

Do you have any dream roles?

Elizabeth Moss’s character in The Handmaid’s Tale. I would also love to be part of a woman buddy cop film. And I would love to work with Alankrita Shrivastava and Konkona Sen Sharma. They portray women as they should be portrayed on screen.

I don’t want women characters to shy away from showing sexual desire. I want to see women making their own choices – whether to be a homemaker, a doctor or a mafia queen. SHWETA TRIPATHI, actor