Pearle Maaney in a photo of Ludo (courtesy pearl)
Strong points
- “I didn’t know if this was really happening,” Pearle Maaney said
- “I thought if he wasn’t happy he could change me,” she said
- “I never had an audition with him,” she said of Anurag Basu
Bombay:
Malayalam actor Pearle Maaney says she was unsure if director Anurag Basu was happy with his performance throughout the first show of his first Hindi film, Ludo.
Maaney, popular for hosting TV shows and appearing in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films, said she was surprised when Basu approached her for the black crime comedy.
The actor is best known for the short Malayalam 2015 Punchirikku Parasparam, 2016 Telugu romantic-comedy Kalyana vaibhogame, Malayalam horror comedy Pretham and sci-fi movie malayalam 2018 WHO.
Ludo follows four different stories and also features Abhishek Bachchan, Aditya Roy Kapur, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Sanya Malhotra, Rohit Saraf, Inayat Verma, Asha Negi and Shalini Vats.
In an interview with PTI via a Zoom call, Maaney said the fact that she was chosen for the project without any auditions made her questionable on the Barfi director aware of her work.
“I didn’t know if this was really happening until the first program was over. Even during the first program I thought if he was not happy with my performance he might change me because I never had an audition with him. “
Maaney said she often wondered what convinced Basu that she could pull off her role, which barely has any dialogue, as the director might not even have seen his Southern films.
“I had this question constantly, because I had never acted before, I had no experience in Bollywood. I couldn’t understand why he ranked me among all the great actors. But he had this strong conviction,” added the actor.
In the film, Maaney plays a Malayali nurse whose fortunes change overnight after a chance encounter.
Maaney said she later realized that she was chosen to reflect authenticity on screen and that she was happy that a Hindi speaking actor was not made to play a southern India.
In the film, the trail of Maaney, co-star of Saraf, parallels the other three stories and develops into the inevitable face-to-face when the four worlds collide.
She said she was amazed at the way Basu directed the movie. With minimal history, Maaney said she saw the director build the set. Ludo world like magic.
“Once I saw how he worked with everyone, whom he likes to experience on set, I realized he had a lot on his mind. Bringing together four different stories is not easy. It’s his bravery to think of a story like Ludo and take on this incredible challenge.
“It’s not even a film where you can delegate the work to assistant directors. There were times when even the ADs (assistant directors) had no idea. It was all in your head and that was wonderful to see how he did it. “
Much like the rest of the cast, Maaney said she didn’t know anything about the film when she got on board.
The actor said that Basu’s secrecy sometimes even extended until the moment an actor was about to give his picture.
“When the picture was getting ready and we were asking him what to do, even then he would say ‘go in front of the camera, I’ll tell you.’ This is how we worked. He wouldn’t give us a difficult scene without briefing us, but if it was a light scene or wanted a subtle expression, he wouldn’t give much detail. “
She said the director was so specific in what he wanted that he even showed the actors the exact phrase he needed and that the cast “should sometimes reflect that.
“That’s how well he knew his characters. All the colors were in him. He was rolling the dice, we were just the players guided by him,” she added.
Ludo is slated to hit Netflix on November 12.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
