Actress Radhika Apte said it’s challenging to find roles that inspire her, which serves as one of the causes why she only takes on a limited number of projects.
The 37-year-old performer, who splits her time between India and the UK, most recently appeared in Mrs. Undercover on ZEE5, in which she portrays Durga, a housewife turned spy.
“It is difficult these days to find that good script as everyone is making everything so fast, there are lots of other parameters that have to fit in. It is difficult to find roles that you just wholeheartedly go and feel this is so well crafted,” Apte spoke to PTI in a virtual interview.
“I live in two countries. I work when I want to do work. I don’t do a lot of work because it makes me feel quite exhausted, so I select less work, I like it that way. When I don’t work, I write, read, and do things other than acting,” she further added.
“I just say, ‘I don’t feel like doing the part right now.’ It is hard to reject because sometimes you don’t have anything else and you feel, ‘Will I get work?’ As a freelance actor, you are constantly thinking about your next project, it can be scary but it is ok.”
Radhika Apte, who is well-known for performances in films like Badlapur, Phobia, Andhadhun, and Monica, O My Darling, claimed that Mrs. Undercover is a break from the tough characters she is used to playing.
“You always try to find roles that are different from what you have done before. So, that is intentional. When I was approached for this, they (makers) didn’t have a script, they had an idea.
“I liked the idea about a housewife being an undercover spy and finding out that she has much more to do in life, and that she deserves much more than her husband’s treatment. And this was a comedy spy thriller, it’s a genre I have never seen, so I was quite excited about it,” she averred.
She claimed that she had fun performing the stunts for the Anushree Mehta-directed ZEE5 movie.
“It is a new thing for me, it was fun to do because I had never done it before. There is clumsiness to it, there is proper action at times (too). It was a lot of fun,” she said.
In the 2019 American espionage movie A Call to espionage, Radhika Apte, who formerly portrayed real-life British secret operative of Indian heritage Noor Inayat Khan, claimed that there is currently a “wave” of spy films.
“Everybody is making spy films, which is fine, it will come and go. There is always a wave of something, biopics, romance, action, etc, different genres, different things coming and going, so it is probably one of them,” she mentioned.
Pathaan, Mission Majnu, The Night Manager, and Special Ops are some recent web series and espionage flicks.
“It is a thing that everybody wants to watch right now, it is exciting and adventurous. But we have had spy stories for a long time, we have grown up watching different spy stories, mysteries and whodunnits. As I said, the genres come and go,” she further averred.