Bold & Beautiful

You don’t have to show your cleavage, cover up now,” Deepika Padukone mock-scolds Neil Nitin Mukesh, her co-star in Lafangey Parindey and now “friend”, as he tugs at his unbuttoned collar upon hearing her applaud his work in the film. The easy banter sets the tone of the conversation. The camaraderie is evident and one hopes it translates into chemistry on-screen when the film releases early next month.

The movie, as the name suggests, explores the story of two people who belong to the underbelly of Mumbai. While Mukesh plays ruffian One Shot Nandu, who can pummel his opponents in the ring blindfolded, Padukone plays the blind Pinky Palkar, who can dance with roller skates. Despite all odds stacked against them, the two hope to make it big in life one day. “The word lafanga isn’t one with negative connotations; it simply refers to people who want to break away from routine life to do something different,” explains Padukone.

The promos have created a buzz as Mukesh promises to return with the spunk he had displayed in his debut Johnny Gaddar and Padukone deviates from the young urban characters that she has mostly played to date. “It was extremely challenging to pretend to be blind, keeping your eyes focussed as if staring in space when I could actually see all along,” the young actress asserts.

What helped, she says, is rehearsing scenes blindfolded and then re-rehearsing them with eyes open to compare performances. “And we also tried to make it spontaneous,” adds her co-star, “If there was a scene where she was to grab hold of a glass placed on a table, we would shift it a bit when she wasn’t looking so that her grapple to locate it looked real.”

If playing a visually impaired girl was the leggy actress’ challenge, Mukesh had to train in boxing and performing bike stunts. “I didn’t even know how to ride a bike till two years ago,” he exclaims. Like most children, he too was prohibited from taking to the crowded Mumbai roads on two wheels. “Though I took naturally to riding a bike, much credit goes to the action director Shyam Kaushal who trained us to perform the stunts safely.” Today, he owns a Yamaha R1, one of the fanciest sports bikes.

Upon examining the many posters of the upcoming film, one realises that Mumbai plays the third crucial character in Lafangay Parindey. “In the first five minutes of the film, you’ll be transported into a very different world—though familiar, it’s a world most of us subconsciously block out,” says Padukone. Mukesh, however, admits that unlike the actress who is from Bangalore, he grew up watching this aspect of Mumbai. “There’s a wadi in my house’s lane and I’ve seen that world because the inhabitants are people who visit my house every year for the Ganpati festival. Yet, it took me months to prepare for this role—learning their dialect of Hindi, the pronunciations or simply understanding where their sense of bravado, which we witness in the streets and on the train roofs, stems from.”

As Padukone admits that much of her sense of bearing for Pinky’s character came from Mukesh’s inputs, she reveals how the actor filled in for the make-up man one day, the action choreographer on another and an assistant on the third. “One day the make-up man didn’t turn up on the sets and I was left stranded.

Though the character requires a minimal look, one has to use basic make-up. I was scared when Neil offered to help but I gave in eventually and wasn’t let down,” she says. “He was there throughout and I’ve made a friend for life.” In an industry where relationships are often fickle, one wonders if Padukone—who got a taste of it herself when Ranbir Kapoor parted ways with her early this year—means what she says. To this, Mukesh jumps to her rescue as he jokes, “Why are you putting the doubt in her head?”

Source: indianexpress