Dressed in a pair of jeans and moss green jacket and hair done up in a messy bun, actor Sayani Gupta exudes class. As we meet at a star hotel in Kolkata after rescheduling the interview twice, Sayani gives us watn greetings even as she tells apologetically, “It’s been a whirlwind trip to Kolkata, I’ve been here for three days and leaving tomorrow,” says the actor apologetically. This year has been so busy for this 33-year-old, petite actor that she got only six days off.
It’s not going to get any less busy for the artiste next year, too -- she is debuting in Tollywood with Arindam Sil’s thriller, Khela Jokhon, where she plays the protagonist. “Yeah, finally I’m doing a Bengali film, because the script simply hooked me,” tells the FTII Pune graduate.
Khela Jokhon’s script has been co-written by Arijit Biswas, who’s written the scripts of Badlapur, Agent Vinod and Andhadhun. It’s a story of a woman called Urmi, who has just come out of coma and finds out that her beliefs and reality are contradictory to each other andputs her in situations that tend to make her violent. Abir Chatterjee plays her husband and the film also stars Adil Hussain, Tanushree Shankar, Jayant Kripalani and Indraashish Roy among others. “I also sustained a fracture in my right toe, while practising martial arts for this film just hours before my arrival to Kolkata,” she takes off her black brogues to show the plaster around her toe.
Sayani, who got noticed for her debut performance as a blind Muslim girl in Shonali Bose’s Margarita With A Straw, and bagged the best actress award at the Indian Film Festival Los Angeles for Payal Sethi’sLeeches, a hard-hitting story of a Hyderabadi Muslim girl, who saves her sister from being sold off to a sheikh, is fed up of being tagged as a serious actor.
Apart from small roles in Jagga Jasoos, Fan andBaar Baar Dekho, she hasn’t really made a mark in mainstream Bollywood. “I want to do commercial films, I just love them, I grew up watching Govinda and Karisma Kapoor, and Shah Rukh Khan is my favourite,” stresses the sprightly actor, while admitting to refusing a comic role in a big-budget Bolly movie without even reading the script.
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The actor is also choosy about her roles in web series and her performance as a cricket team analyst in Inside Edge had been acclaimed by Naseeruddin Shah, who was her teacher at FTII. “I’m also a part of Inside Edge 2,” she informs.
Besides that, Sayani will also be seen in a pivotal role in Four More Shots Please, to be released in January on Amazon Prime. “It’s about four working girls in Mumbai fighting their own individual battles. I play Damini Rizvi Roy, an upfront journalist, who runs an investigative web portal. It’s refreshing that women are portrayed as fiercely independent with grey shades, and frailties,” she tells. She will also be seen in a satire, Axone, produced by Saregama, where she plays a Nepali girl, and a yet-to-be announced adventure drama.