Just as easily as she is able to slip in and out of Hindi, English, French and Tamil, Pondicherry-born Kalki Koechlin can just as easily portray the prim, proper and uptight Natasha in Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, as the modern interpretation of Chandramukhi in Dev D or idealistic student Shalini in Shanghai. For her forthcoming release, Margarita, With A Straw, Kalki had to employ a new discipline and practice; after all it is no mean feat to portray a wheelchair-bound young girl with cerebral palsy.
As much as she is a well-recognised actor, Kalki has, of late, also been extremely vocal on issues pertaining to women’s rights, equality and breaking of stereotypes available on various social networking platforms and digital media. Though her stardom comes from Bollywood films like Zindagi… and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani, Kalki steadfastly straddles independent and commercial cinema, but her heart remains in theatre. She was recently seen in Trivial Disasters, and will soon be directing her debut theatrical production.
Pushing limits
But first there’s the release of Shonali Bose’s Margarita, With A Straw, a film she says she took “no time at all” to agree to. Having done so, it then required many weeks of hard work to transform into playing the part of Laila convincingly. The starting point for Bose’s script was her cousin Malini, although Margarita, With A Straw is a largely fictional story set in Delhi and New York. Koechlin met the director and her cousin together for the first time. “It was an awkward first meting because Malini was star-struck and Shonali kept instructing her to show me how she walks etc.
I think Malini felt she was on exhibit in front of an actor. So we decided to just hang out,” says Kalki. This entailed going to the movies, to parties, getting drunk and having sleepovers. “Staying over at her house was useful because the insight into her personal space gave me a realistic understanding of how to brush teeth, what changing and bed time involved. I also met her physiotherapist and speech therapist to understand how breathing works, because that really affects speech.”
After all the research and observation, Kalki’s next task was to practice, everyday. “The first few times you try and do something you feel you are hamming. I would say it’s a bit like playing a musical instrument. You have to do your riyaaz everyday, so it becomes muscle memory. When someone plays from the heart, it becomes a part of their system. For six months, I was in Laila mode for a couple of hours everyday.”
An ardent advocate of breaking stereotypes, this film helped her overcome limited knowledge and understanding of people with disabilities. “I didn’t know people with disabilities go out and get drunk. It never occurred to me! So this opened my life up so much, which is why I loved the script immediately.” The daily discipline of practice is another turning point in Kalki’s career and something she wishes to incorporate in future roles, as far as possible.
“Obviously, there are films which are perhaps natural and close to who you are as a person, especially commercial films. But if a film set is set in a different era, where people walked and talked differently, then those things cannot come naturally. Just research is also not enough. You have to do riyaaz. We do that in theatre, but not enough in film, and I have realised that it is important for transforming yourself, otherwise I can be Kalki in every film,” she says.
She uses the example of another film she has completed to illustrate her point further. In Waiting (by director Anu Menon) Kalki’s character wears kajal, something the actor never does. “But I started wearing kajal and as a result I started walking and talking differently. My character has a coolness about her. She’s a bit like a female stand-up comic, with her blasé comfort. So I too started being in that zone.”
Her other films are a girl-bonding road movie called Jiah Aur Jiah with Richa Chadda, Mantra by Nicholas Kharkongor and Love Affair being directed by Soni Razdan. “I don’t know what’s happening with Jiah Aur Jiah — it has been stuck for a while. We have finished most of the shoot, but I am not the kind of person who meddles after the film, unless someone asks for my opinion. I just wait.”
In her zone
Kalki is currently prepping for her part in the 1950s love story Love Affair co-starring Gulshan Devaiah and Ali Fazal. For this, she has to amend her body language, posture and adopt a crisp British accent. “I play a half-English-half-Indian woman so she has an accent but speaks good Urdu. I have started practising with a pencil in my mouth and watching old 50s films to see the nuances of how they would talk, put on a jacket, sit etc,” she says, clearly looking forward to the challenge.
In her short career as a film actor, which began in 2009 with Anurag Kashyap’s Dev D, Kalki has worked with an array of interesting directors from Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee to Zoya Akhtar, Ayan Mukherji and Bose. Ask her what differences she has noticed, if any, between male and female directors, and she says, “There’s no real difference. It depends on the individual. Shonali is emotional and wears her heart on her sleeve. Zoya is one of the boys, and chilled out. Then Dibakar is almost like a woman — OCD and controlling. Anurag is so whatever. With Ayan, there was always a lot of chitchat. Personally, I feel women talk more about the role and there tends to be a lot of chitchat.”
Besides the actor, writer, poet, director and conscience-keeper, who is Kalki Koechlin after pack up? “I love switching off my phone and going trekking, disconnecting from this Twitter-Twitter world. I don’t read that much any more because I read so many scripts, I suppose. I recently learned to surf and I love watching movies,” says the 32-year-old.
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