'I like to be good at what I'm doing'

Ambitious Side

Huma Qureshi is more than just the ambitious new actress on the block. While she’s hyper and bubbly off-screen, she’s dead serious when it comes to work. She talks to Metrolife about why she joined Bollywood, her romantic side and her character Zoya Rehman in ‘D-Day’.

“Zoya is an explosive expert and undercover immigration lawyer. On the surface, she’s a girl of few words and may come across as a little steely. But she’s quite human and fragile like anybody else,” explains Huma, adding, “I’ve never done action before and I didn’t think anyone would cast me in an action movie. But I’m very grateful to Nikhil (Advani) for giving me this opportunity. I hope I’ve done justice to what he had in mind.”

On what level can she relate to the character? “Zoya’s very different from who I am. I’m a very emotional person but Zoya’s calm and collected and knows what she has to do. I’m far more volatile as a person that way. But Zoya also has the ability to put on these masks whenever required. I think I can do that because I’m an actress,” she replies.

Huma admits that being an actress wasn’t exactly her childhood dream. “My parents always thought I’d do something more academic like sciences. But I quit that and did humanities instead because I told them I wanted to be a civil service officer,” she recalls.

Having been brought up in a conservative middle-class family, acting was the last thing her parents or she could imagine herself doing. “When you’re growing up, everybody goes through these adolescent pains and feelings of self-doubt where you wonder whether you’re good enough. Acting was something I really enjoyed doing.

But it was also one of those things I could never accept that I wanted to do. It’s not the easiest thing to tell your friends and family that I want to be an actress because they’ll laugh at you and say tumko heroine banna hai? You do get mocked,” she
confesses.

But it was her father who let her pursue her dream. “I told my father ‘Dad, if I don’t do this now, I’ll always hold it against you that you never let me try’. That’s when he got emotional and said ‘Do it. But if it doesn’t work out within a year, you better come back and sort your life out.’ I respect him for that because if he hadn’t given me the deadline, I’d probably have been lazy,” reminisces Huma.

“It had more reasons for it not to work out than to work out. But I guess sometimes you just have to hang in there, do your thing and believe in yourself. I’m an ambitious person and I like to be good at what I’m doing. Acting has given me confidence. It’s put me in touch with myself,” she adds. She wants to grow old with films, be it as a wrinkled actress, director or even a producer. But the one thing she really wants to do is act in a romantic comedy. “More than actors and directors, the genre I want to work in is romance because I think it’ll reflect who I am. I’m a very rom-com sort of a girl. I love movies that make you well up and cry,” she wraps up.