This industry is all about glamour and you’ve taken one of its biggest names, Deepika Padukone her last film, ‘Padmaavat’, was about a Queen known for her beauty to play an acid attack survivor. What was her first reaction to her prosthetic look in the film?
It takes courage to discard your calling card and bare yourself completely. When you are shorn of all the usual trapping shair, make-up, costume, jewellery with only your craft exposed, it’s a brave path to walk and Deepika has done it with flourish. For me, it was important to take a face associated with beauty because when you distort it, like it would happen to a survivor, the contrast and impact is far stronger. Not everybody is Deepika Padukone, but these other girls were beautiful too and didn’t deserve this to happen to them. No girl deserves it going forward. I’m fortunate Deepika agreed to play the part. During our research, we discovered that Laxmi aggarwal’s pictures before the attack are strikingly similar to Deepika’s when she was young. There is an uncanny similarity in their physicality which shows up in the prosthetics. That was my starting point. Then came the larger thought of the impact of the message which would get magnified with her in the lead as Malti (who is fashioned after Laxmi). The idea wasn’t to make Deepika look like Laxmi, but to make her look like what she’d have looked, God forbid, if something like this happened to her. The essence of Deepika is still there, particularly in her eyes.
