Aditi Rao Hydari on playing diverse characters: ‘I want the audience to take me home with them’
She described her role as the courtesan Bibbojaan in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Netflix series ‘Heeramandi’ as a dream come true.
In the period drama Jubilee, Aditi Rao Hydari played movie star Sumitra Kumari. In Taj: Divided by Blood, set in the Mughal times, she played Anarkali. Her latest series Heeramandi is also a period piece that unfolds in Lahore during the British Raj. Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s opulent costume drama, set in the world of tawaifs, nawabs, and simmering anti-British revolution, will be premiered on Netflix on May 1.
Heeramandi also stars Manisha Koirala, Sonakshi Sinha, Richa Chadha, Sanjeeda Sheikh and Sharmin Sehgal. Rao Hydari plays the courtesan Bibbojaan. She has previously worked with Bhansali in Padmaavat (2018).
The Hyderabad-born actress made her debut with Sharada Ramanathan’s Tamil film Sringaram (2004), but her first theatrical release was Ranjith’s Malayalam-language Prajapathi (2006). Her Hindi debut came with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6 (2009). Her credits include Mani Ratnam’s Kaatru Veliyidai (2017) and Chekka Chivantha Vaanam (2018).
Rao Hydari is frequently cast as a vulnerable and fragile classical beauty, but she has much more to give as a performer, she told Scroll. Excerpts from an interview.
What about ‘Heeramandi’ appealed to you, and what can you tell us about Bibbojaan?
I became an actor because of Mani Ratnam and Sanjay Leela Bhansali. I saw [Ratnam’s] Bombay and [Bhansali’s] Khamoshi, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do. Both films had Manisha Koirala in them, so it was surreal...
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