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Deepika Padukone has been having a golden time at the box office with films like Pathaan and Jawan and as she gears up–with fingers crossed–for a hattrick with her latest aerial actioner Fighter, the actor says there is some slight tweaking that needs to be done when it comes to film reading.
These three films, coupled with her next two, Singham Again and Prabhas starrer Kalki 2898 AD are inherently stories driven by men. Though Deepika has been a big female presence in her three releases, an overview of her lineup has raised questions about how the action films she is choosing are still male centric.
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When asked about this during a media interaction, Deepika said, “Yeah sure, wait for Shakti Shetty!” referring to Rohit Shetty’s big-screen female cop universe film to be headlined by her. The character will be introduced in Singham 3 and would eventually have a standalone action film later.
“But to complete my thought, you never anyway never do anything alone. I don’t think women can succeed without men and men can’t succeed without women. I think we need to rephrase the definition of feminism,” she added.
Except for her 2022 release Gehraiyaan, Deepika’s line-up has been of big spectacle films. The actor said it isn’t by design, as she had always empowered mid-size films like Piku, Chhapaak and Finding Fanny back in the day.
When asked if there is space in her career now to do a Piku, Deepika said, “The space is there, the writers have to write. It will happen, I think it is just a matter of time. Post COVID, everyone felt a bit rattled. It was a new experience everyone was coming out of and we made a lot of assumptions about where we are headed. We are jumping too soon in this journey of what’s working, what’s not working, that only big budgets films (are working). Actors service a script, a director. You invest in stories, you invest in characters, you invest in people, you invest in the journey.”
The actor said she doesn’t care if she is headlining a Rs 50 crore budget movie or a film mounted on Rs 25 crore, as her ultimate goal is to greenlight a script that moves her. “I am more than happy to do that, and I’ve demonstrated by doing that pre-pandemic. In fact, even post-pandemic, Gehraiyaan was one of them.
“So, I’m always open. I’ve always been that actor. Way before I’ve done films like–they didn’t do well so we don’t remember them–Finding Fanny, Chhapaak, Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Sey, there are a lot of these movies. So, as an actor, I’m most excited about telling stories, whether it happens to be a Rs 500 crore budget film or a Rs 50 crore; I’ve never looked at that. I am interested in telling a story,” she added.
Directed by Siddharth Anand and also starring Hrithik Roshan, Fighter is out in cinemas.
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