Swastika Mukherjee's latest web show is Escaype Live on Disney+ Hotstar. (Photo: Instagram/Swastika Mukherjee)Actor Swastika Mukerjee says coming from a regional film industry, “people don’t get to see the kind of work you do,” and that according to her is a “practical drawback”. The Bengali star has been around for over 15 years, but it took her a project like Paatal Lok (2020) to grab attention of the Hindi-speaking audience.
“Maybe you’ve done something really rebellious and gone out of the way to portray the character way back in 2015. And something like that is happening in Bollywood now, that’s when the entire nation has woken up to it,” she said in a free-wheeling chat with indianexpress.com.
According to Swastika, OTT came into life her at the right time, when the audience is willing to explore work beyond language barrier. “If I keep thinking about how we could have done things differently before, I’ll just end up being very regretful,” she said.
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Swastika, who was also seen in Dil Bechara (2020) playing the mother of Kizie Basu (Sanjana Sanghi), has earlier wooed late actor Sushant Singh Rajput onscreen in Detective Byomkesh Bakshy (2015). Given the fact how she enacted different generations in both the movies, she called it a great plus for an actor. “A lot of people asked me why I agreed for the role of Mrs Basu. But for me, I see it as a challenge, if I can play Sushant’s muse and then play his mother-in-law as well.”
The 41-year-old actor, however, said people started bracketing her in mother roles after Dil Bechara. Reiterating how even today, the industry is stuck with a “certain kind of body, size, looks and age needed to play a certain character,” Swastika recalled she had to back-out of several projects due to this.
“After Dil Bechara, I got offers to play mother to a man who was around 10 years younger to me. I said I can’t play a mother to a 30-year-old. Some bizarre offers also came where the person was older to me. They were big films with big stars. My daughter warned me about taking up any such role. Actors getting typecast needs to change. With women, it needs to break more.”
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Swastika, however expressed relief that in her latest show Escaype Live on Disney+ Hotstar, she isn’t playing a mother but an entrepreneur. “Thank god I don’t have kids calling me mummy!” She added, “I’m happy that Escaype Live happened to me, which deals with social media and its nuances in so many ways. It’s a great combination of emotions to watch on screen.”
While she’s picky about projects in Hindi, we asked her about how she sees the rise of ‘pan-India‘ movies. Asserting that the term has got restricted to the south-Indian film industry, she said, “I think if you’re saying pan-India, it should be truly pan-India and not just one or two parts of the country.”
“We get to see a lot of north Indian setup in our films. That’s become quite a big thing in content, and also a lot of focus on Malayalam films. Though, they are making incredible cinema, but I also feel we need to explore Bengal, and even the east. There is so much of good work happening in Assam. There are directors who are taking their films to the Academy Awards,” she added.
Swastika Mukherjee’s upcoming projects including Netflix film Qala.
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