The year 2023 has ended well for Bangladeshi actor Jaya Ahsan. The prolific actress picked up her fifth Bangladeshi National Award for best actress for her film Beauty Circus and is also grabbing national attention for her impressive debut in Bollywood in Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury's Kadak Singh. Jaya is getting heaped with praises for her subtle and nuanced portrayal of Kadak Singh's clandestine lover, Naina. Demure, kind, and hesitant, Jaya has ably performed through a heart-melting body language in this short yet crucial character. We speak with the humble actress about her success and upcoming projects in the year ahead.
How thrilled are you about the responses to your performance?
As an actor, during performing all these worries of doing it in the right or wrong way doesn’t occur to me. I never like surpassing or exceeding the film but embellish it. It feels great when people praise that effort. So far all my films have earned me appreciation, but getting the same for my first Hindi film was humbling since I had to put in that extra effort in grasping a new language. My role was short but that it was not lost in the maze of brilliant performances by my co-actors made me really happy.
You received the Bangladeshi National Award for the fifth time. How does it feel?
I worked very hard on the film Beauty Circus. I play the owner of the circu where she also performs as a trapeze artiste. I had to do extremely difficult and fatal stunts for the same including balancing acts and riding untrained elephants. It was physically exhausting and fatal but while acting a certain kind of madness possesses us that makes us take risks. It fills me with gratitude that the entire nation appreciated me and awarded me for the same.
You are going to be a part of Aniruddha’s next Bengali film, Dear Ma. Tell us a little about that?
Tony (Aniruddha) is doing a Bengali film after almost a decade. I had always wanted to act in his films since they are always so sensitively different. I loved the script which is an emotionally driven relationship story. Tony is a very sensitive director who handles human emotions deftly without turning it into a drag. After Kadak Singh, I now understand what he wants from an actor to a great extent. So, I am looking forward to the second one in Bengali.
We hear you are getting quite a few meaty offers in big banner productions from Bollywood? Are we hearing any news soon?
I am going through a few scripts. But nowadays, I say yes to a project only if it challenges me as an actor and gets me excited. More than the length of the role, it’s the strength of the character, and its significance to the story that matter to me. So, keeping my fingers crossed.