Biopics are tougher than fictional films: Vidya Balan

A day after releasing the Paheli song from her upcoming film Shakuntala Devi, the biopic of the renowned mathematician, fondly called as the Human Computer, Vidya Balan talks to us on signing up for yet another biopic after Dirty Picture and No One Killed Jessica, among others. “I love the fact that I play different real life characters on screen. The essence of who they are is important when we play real life characters. You will have to maintain a fine balance. Biopics are more challenging than fictional roles as they need to have more authenticity,” she tells us. The actress says that her love for mathematics came in handy for the film. “I was good in numbers and math even as a kid. I used to remember birthdays and car numbers. For the film though, I was given readymade numbers and I didn’t have to calculate,” she quips. However, Vidya says that one challenging thing was to match Shakuntala’s accent for the film premiering on Amazon Prime this Friday. “She had a south Indian accent, which was quite difficult for me to match. My parents, my uncles and aunt speak in south Indian accent and I took notes from them. Apart from that, one thing we had in common was we both laugh really loud after cracking jokes. Shakuntala has an amazing sense of humour. Her shows were more like magic shows that people, who didn’t understand math, too started loving it,” says the actress.

Talking about today’s women not being able to pursue their ambitions, Vidya says, “There is this belief that once women are married, their entire life must revolve around children and family. Shakuntala is someone who broke that jinx. Being a mother , she still pursued her passion which was math. She struck a fine balance.” In the last few days, AR Rahman and Resul Pookutty had said that they were denied work in Bollywood. When asked about it and being able to sustain her stardom in the industry for over a decade, the actress pauses for a bit and says, “Deaf! I turn deaf for all the criticism that is being made against me. I take constructive criticism positively but I ignore all the unnecessary criticism that is directed towards me. That is what has helped me in being successful and sustain my stardom.” After Ner Konda Paarvai, Vidya tells us that she hasn’t heard any appealing scripts from the south. “You have seen the kind of films that I have been doing. I haven’t come across any such stories from the south. I will definitely do when I get one,” she concludes.