'I have become more free as a person!'

Shedding inhibitions, being vocal, trying various genres and going forward with the changes that she introduced in herself, Soha Ali Khan is trying her best to make her individual identity stand out as distinct from that of her lineage. Not afraid to experiment new things, she talks to Metrolife about her transition from a saree-clad royal princess to a bikini-clad babe.

“I wanted people to sit up and say ‘Oh we did not see Soha like this!’” says the damsel who is done with playing “roles that are of demure girls from good royal family lineages. I want to do things where people accept me in a different light because nobody wants to be a typecast,” she asserts, while promoting her upcoming film Joe B Carvalho, where she plays an undercover cop who also dons a bikini.

“Personally I didn’t have any inhibitions. I knew people would make references to my mother being the first one to wear bikini on screen and Kareena wearing it in Kambakkht Ishq, and was prepared for it. But the most important thing was to make it look aesthetic and not crass.” 

This was ensured by her director, “Samir Tewari who is himself so shy that he didn’t want me to wear it for more than two shots. He insisted on ‘no weird camera angles’ which made me confident,” she confides adding that her role of a cop with a petite built will only “Break a stereotype. It is a comedy film, so it’s not supposed to be taken seriously,” shares the actress who enjoyed portraying a ‘dabang’ and flamboyant character. “I wear Aviator sunglasses and get to beat up 8-10 goondas in. It’s so much fun to be able to do that,” she exclaims.

Taking delight in essaying back-to-back comic characters, Soha thinks that “Usually when you do a big dramatic scene, people take notice of it, like my breakdown scene in Rang de Basanti. Unfortunately, comedy is not taken seriously and doesn’t win you too many awards.”

She admits to her partiality for comedy of late and reasons it out as a ‘balancing act’. “You do powerful female protagonist cinema (such as in Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns) where your role is quite intense and then you do films like Joe... which is a liberating experience. Ideally, I would like to do both because as an actor you want to work with directors like Tigmanshu Dhulia, but then you do feel like following it up with a film where you can deliver whacky dialogues while maintaining a poker face.”

This, however, is not the Soha who was conditioned to maintain her composure. “When I entered cinema, I had to unlearn a lot of things such as not showing your em­o­­t­ions or display histrionics in front of others. We were bro­u­ght up in a family where you don’t raise your voice or throw tantrums but go to your room and count 10 or have a little cry by yourself,” reveals the actress about her upbringing. Something that she had to change, by “Being expressive. I was very guarded and had to learn how to lose my inhibitions on the set where you do ridiculous things that I had never done before. I have become more comfortable doing that on screen now and want to just take that further. I have become more free as a person!”