Freida Pinto talks about the future for Hollywood post-#MeToo

By the time Freida Pinto and I collect our lemon ginger teas from a coffee shop in the leafy Hancock Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, the table we had been eyeing outside has been taken. Pinto turns to me and says, “Let’s go,” then dashes across Larchmont Boulevard and slips into a nearby cafe, hoping no one will notice that we BYO’d. “I have breakfast here every other morning. It should be fine,” she says with that megawatt smile. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever says no to her. “But they might just kick us out who knows. I never take anything for granted anymore.”

After her breakout role in Danny Boyle’s multi-Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, Pinto has quietly scored part after part, working with the most celebrated directors in cinema today (Julian Schnabel, Michael Winterbottom and Terrance Malik to name a few), starring alongside the likes of Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Willem Dafoe. But despite the subsequent flood of work, things weren’t as sunny as they seemed.

“When Slumdog happened it was just like high, high, high,” she says stretching her hand into the sky. “At some point it had to come down, right? Sometimes when the start is higher, the fall is greater.” Pinto explains that, with very little work in her late twenties, this was one of the most difficult times in her career. She partly attributes the hiatus to the lack of compelling roles to be had. “I was feeling degraded by the offers that were coming in. ‘Is this what you think I’m capable of?’,” she remembers asking herself, and by extension, the powers that be in Hollywood. “I indulged in a lot of anxious thoughts and going down a rabbit hole of ‘I should have chosen those roles.’” I ask if she means the “exotic princess” roles she had spoken about in a previous interview? She replies, “Yeah. And I’ve done them. Once is enough. After a while I said, ‘I don’t want to do this shit anymore, I’m not growing in my career.’”

What began as an eye-opening, first-hand experience of the cruel realities of Hollywood—namely the lack of multi-dimensional parts for women, especially women of colour—ended up being a crucial time for self-growth.

These days, at 34, Pinto has admittedly become a California convert and seems to have comfortably settled into her groove. “When I moved to Los Angeles from London in 2011, I wasn’t happy about it,” she remembers. “Although I hated the first two years, now I miss this city when I’m gone.” She’s found a small group of friends, including her roommate, Preeti Desai (former Miss Great Britain), who she fondly refers to as her “wife”. Each morning, Pinto practices meditation and chanting, she’s into cleanses (she is currently abstaining from red meat), and speaks of the benefits of a simple, pared-back lifestyle (she cleans out her closet four times a year giving away anything that she deems not totally “essential”).

Naturally, she also has a yoga guru in Silver Lake. She insists, though, that her practice has nothing to do with Los Angeles and everything to do with the 2014 film Desert Dancer, when she worked with choreographer Erin Elliott. “Erin asked me if I had ever done yoga and I said, ‘Oh no no no, don’t try to get me to do yoga. You freakin’ Angelenos are all quacks. I come from the country of yoga! I do not need a white person to teach me yoga.’ But I was so wrong,” she says looking down as if still sorry. “I discovered my body for the first time. I discovered where I hold my sorrow and happiness. It opened me up emotionally.”

When we meet, Pinto has just returned from a 48-day trip to India and Nepal. It’s the longest she’s spent in India since she left for London in 2008. Officially she was there to promote her new Netflix film, Mowgli—playing Messua, Mowgli’s mother, after taking the initiative to call the director Andy Serkis (who she worked with on Planet of the Apes) to actively ask for a role. Unofficially she was tour guide to her boyfriend, adventure photographer Cory Tran, who joined her in Mumbai to see where she grew up and meet her mum, dad and sister for the first time. Apparently it went quite well, “Though I don’t think he was prepared for the level of spice,” she laughs. An upside to never having done a Bollywood film means that Pinto can move around her home country relatively incognito. And Tran isn’t phased, or particularly enamoured with the celebrity world either: “He doesn’t give a f***,” she says, “and I loooove that about him.”

This January, Pinto stars in Love Sonia (released in India in September 2018)—a Hindi film shot between Mumbai, Hong Kong and Los Angeles, which she knew from the get-go was one of those once-in-a-career kind of stories that needed to be told. Inspired by real events, writer, director and activist Tabrez Noorani pulls back the veil on the sex trafficking industry, with the story of a young Indian girl in search of her sister who disappears in Mumbai’s red-light district. Pinto and Noorani first met on the set of Slumdog in 2007 (he was a line producer), which is when he asked her to read an early draft of the Love Sonia script. Pinto was both disturbed by what she read and immediately drawn to the character of Rashmi, a 30-something sex worker, with a schizophrenic-like demeanour, damaged from years of abuse.

“I had just finished playing Latika in Slumdog and I was like, ‘This was too much sunshine,’” explains Pinto of the motivation to do something darker, edgier. “I came alive when I read this part. I got into the mindset of jealousy, the fear of not being the one on top anymore, not being the preferred one. She [Rashmi] wants to be the special one.”

Ten years later, Pinto’s predilection towards Rashmi and the urge to do something “wild” and “transformational” remained. In Love Sonia, she is almost unrecognisable—her teeth stained yellow to simulate years of beedi smoking; wearing spandex floral short shorts, a blue crop top and a purple sash tied around her hip (Pinto chose the costume herself).

The film was particularly timely, says Pinto, considering the climate post-#MeToo. “There has to be accountability whether it’s [the sex trafficking industry] or the #MeToo movement. People think they can do whatever they want because, guess what? They can,” she says with frustration, referencing the sexual assault allegation waged by Stanford professor Christine Blasey Ford against the ultimately successful Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018. “There was a strong enough testimonial from Dr Ford, but it still did not stop someone from holding a very powerful position on the Supreme Court. At the end of the day, it’s this mindset that refuses to change.”

“I feel the sense of unity and strength in numbers is so key,” she continues. “The #MeToo movement got a little angry at one point, but I don’t have a problem with anger. There is nothing wrong with expressing anger, it’s healthy.”

So, what makes Pinto angry? “It’s infuriating when girls are not believed. There will always be certain races in this world who will be believed less [than others],” she adds.“They [casting agents, producers and the other cogs that make the wheels of Hollywood turn] will never say something to your face. When you’re smart enough, you understand what they mean when they say, ‘Oh you didn’t get the part because you were too young,’ then they cast someone waaaay younger,” she says. “I also don’t spend too much energy blaming or feeling sorry for myself that the colour of my skin might have been the deciding factor in getting a certain role. It’s beneath me, I don’t want to talk about it and make it real. I want to go out there and get what I deserve. And that has never been taken away from me.”

A turning point came after reading the script for Guerilla (her involvement was announced in 2016, and the first episode aired in April 2017) on a flight to Miami. Inspired by the British Black Panther movement and set in the politically charged London of the 1970s, the mini-series was written and directed by John Ridley and co-starred Idris Elba. Pinto auditioned for over two months before landing the part of Jas Mitra. “Rather than being in the biggest blockbuster movie that wins all the Oscars, it is more important to me to tell the right stories.”

Next up for Pinto is Only, a post-apocalyptic love story co-starring Leslie Odom Jr; and another hotly anticipated project with 12 Years A Slave screenwriter John Ridley called Needle in a Timestack, alongside Orlando Bloom. The latter is slated to premiere at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas in March, which couldn’t be more convenient as Pinto announces that she and Tran are going to start splitting their time between Los Angeles and a home they recently acquired in Austin. Tran grew up in Dallas, but spent his twenties in Austin and it’s where he made his “friend family”. The move will be yet another chance for Pinto to reinvent herself, she jokes, “I’ll be a brisket-making mama.” And you almost believe her.

Also read:

5 female photographers discover men through women’s eyes

These women showcase the true diversity of Indian beauty