Tabu, who will next be seen in Vishal Bhardwaj's desi Hamlet, hopes to lose the serious actress tag with a comic caper.I hope you are not going to ask me why I've turned into a recluse?" are Tabu's first words as we step into her new office. Even though she's often spotted at parties and previews, the media has of late, come to picture her as a real-life Miss Havisham of sorts.
"It's because I'm single and living alone that people assume that I'm a recluse," she says, exasperated. "It adds to the mystery and mystique. Had I been married or in a relationship, things might have been different.
Sach to yeh hai, my life is simple and stupid.
Chahe jitna bhi khod lo, kuch nahin niklega."
Tabu grew up in Hyderabad, waiting for a prince to ride up on a white stallion and sweep her off her feet. But at 16, she moved to Mumbai and into wonderland, and over the years, the gap between fantasy and reality has become too big to bridge.
"Princes came along, but only in the movies," she says wistfully. "Marriage is still important, I don't deny or reject the fact that nature has ordained that we should be with someone who can add something to our lives. But I've also come to understand that you should be with someone for the right reasons and not because it's conventional."
The National Award-winning actress recalls that once, en route to Hyderabad, her Haider co-star, Irrfan Khan, urged her to marry someone with a good sense of humour. Contrary to her intense screen persona, Tabu laughs at the silliest of jokes and finds masala movies thoroughly entertaining.
"I had a blast filming Hera Pheri, Saajan Chale Sasural, Biwi No. 1 and recently Neeraj Pandey's Saat Uchakkey with Manoj Bajpai, shot in a hotel room in Mauritius over just 24 days.
"Before every shot, I would convulse with laughter and director Mukul Abhyankar would wonder if we were making a comedy or a psychological thriller. I want to work with people for whom a film is like a picnic and not someone who aims to change the world," she confides.
That's perhaps one of the reasons Tabu chose to do Jai Ho. She points out that Sohail and Salman Khan are like family. "I've done several films with Salman. There were two offers before this too, but they didn't work out. When Sohail offered me Jai Ho, I grabbed it," she says.
She reveals that she bought her plush apartment in Andheri with the money from concert tours the brothers had coaxed her to do. "The money was great and we had a blast. Ditto Jai Ho," says Tabu.
Has she watched Salman's latest hit Kick, which marks the directorial debut of her 'old friend' Sajid Nadiadwala. She admits she hasn't, but plans to."I always knew that there was a director in Sajid," she says. She'd love to do such big, commercial films with which she started her Bollywood careerwith, and enjoys watching. "I'd love to work with Rohit Shetty. Every time one of his Golmaals play on TV, I sit down to watch," giggles Tabu who was to be a part of Rohit's All The Best before Bipasha Basu decided to do a double role.
READ: Tabu, Shraddha Kapoor sing Vishal Bhardwaj's new tuneThe actress wants to introduce the audience to her lighter side and says Irrfan has promised to make a comedy featuring them, if no one else does. "I've been offered too many dark, intense characters, perhaps because I can pull them off convincingly. I'm just doing my job as an actress without becoming the character I play. If directors feel I have certain skills that work for them, then surely I'll do these films, provided they pay me a lot of money," she asserts.
Of course, Vishal Bhardwaj didn't have to woo her with a fat pay cheque to take on the role of Haider's stepmother in his Hamlet. Though she's surrounded by women who are voracious readers, she doesn't enjoy reading and was clueless about Shakespearean literature.
"Vishal explained that the film was about Haider's search for his father, his ambiguous relationship with his mother. The character had many layers. I hadn't performed in this space in a while. So, it was a good exercise to express myself emotionally. But I wasn't sure about playing Shahid's mother. I wondered if I looked that old," she recalls.
She accepted the film because it gave her a chance to reconnect with her Maqbool director and a part of her family which had relocated to Kashmir. But Vishal has set the first half in autumn and the second in winter which meant shooting in the Valley in November, December and January.
"It was brutally cold, my eyes and nose were watering and my teeth clattering," she shivers even as she recalls the time. "There was a lot happening on screen to a huge canvas of complicated characters, Kashmir and its'90s politics added to the drama. Feelings changed in every frame, yet most of the time all I could think of is, 'Did I say my lines right?" she recollects.
A decade ago, Tabu had played a desi Lady Macbeth to perfection in Maqbool. In Haider she will be seen as an Indianised Gertrude. This brings Vishal's trilogy of tragedies to a close. The director is now planning a trilogy on Shakespearean comedies and Tabu hopes he will return to her with another story she's heard a lot about but never read. "I too want some fun and laughter in reel life," she asserts.
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