Little Miss Nasty

Celina Jaitly goes a step further in her forthcoming Accident on Hill Road to play a woman who,after crashing into a man on the street,drives home with him still wedged halfway through the windshield. Otherwise known for her glamourous portrayals,Jaitly,instead saw potential in the script and also requested the director,Mahesh Nair,to make the character even more vicious.

Conventional portrayals of the leading lady as an innocent girl have given way to more real ones and bad is now considered sexy. Balan says she didn’t hesitate one bit before accepting the role when it came her way. “It isn’t everyday that you are offered a grey character that may need you to tap your underlying feral instincts. The aggressive sexuality my character exudes is there in all of us. After all,Krishna is the typical Indian woman who fits into the shoes of mothers,daughters and sisters during the day but behind the doors,she’s as sexual.”

Traditionally,actresses are known to keep their distance from such roles since Bollywood till a decade ago strongly harboured the concepts of heroines and vamps where an actress,like Helen,would almost never get offered the role of a heroine.

In Nair’s experience,such biases continue to exist—he was turned down by some of the bigger names in the industry since the role was “too grey” to suit their image till he met Jaitly.

According to Jaitly,the traditional representation of a girl is passé. “Today,a film works if you can relate to a character. I play a contemporary youngster from a metropolitan city who parties and even drinks. Most of us think of ourselves before anything else and that is what my character does when she realises that she may find herself in a spot if the cops were to find out about the accident. So she turns manipulative.”

But Balan’s Krishna proves that to portray a negative character effectively,one need not play the modern,“progressive” woman. “You don’t have to be dressed in heels,boots,short dresses or leather pants,though that’s sexy too,” quips Gul Panag. She,in Ram Gopal Varma’s Rann,plays a regular city girl who is willing to overlook the moralistic side of her life if it comes in way of her happiness. “After all,we all have shades of grey without being downright evil.”

But it can be easily said that Priyanka Chopra has made bad fashionable — her role as a selfish,ambitious model in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion helped her bag rave reviews and several Best Actress trophies. The 27-year-old actress’ negative character in Aitraaz,which overshadowed Kareena Kapoor’s,first marked the ascent of her career in the industry. Chopra admits to her affinity towards characters with a shade of noir.

“I got a chance to experiment with roles early on in my career that required me to play more than the usual,glamorous leading lady. Such roles,more than classic beauty,require confidence that needs to shine on screen through the character,” reasons the Fashion girl. “I’m not the most beautiful person in the industry but and I’ve made a person out of myself by being confident.”