A talented and glamourous actor,Swastika Mukherjee is more in the news for her involvements rather than her work. Now flooded with film offers,she is determined to prove her worth. Is it true that you have no hang-ups about doing intimate scenes or wearing skimpy costumes? I would put it differently. I choose roles that are a bit out-of-the-box and not the routine stuff leading ladies do in film after film. If such a role demands intimate scenes,who am I to object? Once in films,an actor needs to keep the windows of his or her mind open to all kinds of demands a role or the director makes to get the best out of the given actor. Anjan Dutts created my character in Byomkesh Bakshi. I consider it a great honour. Most of your films under production have you in unconventional roles. I have been in films since a decade. Maturity demands that I take on unconventional roles. Directors have unusual scripts with challenging characters for me. It is a good time to explore my capabilities as an actress. I am doing Sougata Roy Burmans Tabe Tai Hoke. There is Anik Duttas Bhooter Bhabishyat,Subrata Sens Nondinee,Moinak Bhowmicks Maach Mishti N More,Debadityas Aatta Aaater Bongan Local and Anjandas new film on Byomkesh Bakshi. The storylines of Tabe Tai Hoke and Nondini seem to be dealing with adultery within marriage. Are they not similar with you playing the wife in both? No,both films are reflections of the negotiations married couples enter when they get married and how these equations change sometime into the marriage. It is a common experience in contemporary India for an adult,man or woman,to remain in one relationship and yet get into another one. But the two films are different because the stories are poles apart and the two directors have completely different ways of treatment and perspective. You seem very interested in Bhooter Bhabishyat in which you play a ghost. I play a ghost and it is my house in which the ghosts gather to live together. My character,when alive,was a famous film star from the black-and-white era. But the character did not want to act in films or become a star. She wanted to get married but her father forced her to get into films. So,she commits suicide. Bhooter Bhabishyat is a delightful,tongue-in-cheek film about ghosts of different kinds who gather in a haunted house. and her ghost keeps haunting the house she lived in. Samadarshi is one of the ghosts with I am expected to be involved. He is also playing an eccentric artiste who comes in as a house guest in my husbands mansion who becomes my lover in Tabe Tai Hoke. What are your other projects? In Maach Mishti N More,I play a NRI who comes to Kolkata with her husband to live in an extended joint family and Souvik plays my husband in the film. In Aatta Aaater Bongan Local,I am a journalist. I am also playing a role spanning many years in Raj Mukherjees film where I play the mother in a mother-daughter conflict story. There is also a Sujit Guha film with Prosenjit playing my hero.
