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Cover story: Anushka Sharma on men, media and madness
Vijendra Bhardwaj
Tarun Vishwa
05 December 2014
Ask this A-lister about her personal life - even if you're Karan Johar - and she'll fairly quickly shut you down. But over a plate of her mom's sandwiches, the choosy movie star finally opens up about being so closed off
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Anushka Sharma
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As the insistent A/C attempts some kind of living-room resolution with the heat beaming in from the Arabian Sea, in breezes Anushka Sharma, dressed in eye-squinting white with a summer-light pair of pants and a sleeveless top. She smiles, says hello and sits an isosceles length away on the sectional couch. Her posture is scarecrow-straight, body language tilted towards engagement, but a hand over bare feet curls under her haunches.
It may be an easy analogy to start with: a movie star so spatially near yet physically protected - like a Siamese cat ready to spring away at any moment - but it's accurate enough. This is a business call, and the media hasn't necessarily been kind to Anushka this year. Whether speculating about a sports icon boyfriend she refuses to talk about, or whipping up a froth over a lip job she hasn't confirmed, denied or explained to the peanut gallery's satisfaction, no one was expecting this interview to start with an internet-haemorrhaging confession.
"I don't want everyone to know everything about me," says the 26-year-old everyone wants to know everything about. "I get uncomfortable even when strangers see a part of my house."
Maybe she's talking about another section of the three penthouse apartments fused into this 20th-floor spread where she lives with her brother, mother and father. She seems, for the most part, comfortable enough in this room, "Anushka's space", as her assistant had described it on the way in. But as with other minted interview subjects, I'm suspicious this is more a staging ground than a private lair.
A copy of Naresh Fernandes' Taj Mahal Foxtrot - a book about the history of Bombay's jazz scene Anushka used to research her upcoming turn as a singer in Bombay Velvet - sits at the edge of the coffee table, just waiting to catch a visiting journalist's eye. It's the kind of auto-suggestive trick a journalist would play. Knowing that Anushka plays a reporter in this month's PK, I take the staging-room bait:
So how did you prepare to play a journo in PK?
"Well, it's a commercial Hindi film," she says, referring to her role opposite Aamir Khan and his now-notorious transistor radio, "there wasn't a lot of background research I needed to do for that. It was more about working on the character, in the moment, with the director."
So she didn't exactly go DeNiro-Taxi Driver-method on that one. For Bombay Velvet, though, she felt she needed a lot more preparation. "I had to read a lot because it was a period film," and she took singing lessons. "I can't go on set and sing a song if I don't actually know how to sing. Even though it's not my voice, it makes a huge difference."
So is this like that old Hollywood dictum, "One for them, one for me?"
"Absolutely," she says, "I need to work that way."
If her appearances in PK and Bombay Velvet were calculated, acting isn't the only factor in her career equation. Aside from stepping into the producer's shoes for the upcoming NH10, Anushka is the smiling coffee face of Bru, the zero-calorie-sipping lips of Lipton, the odourless armpits of Nivea and one of two dandruff-free scalps for CLEAR (a shoot where she met her "good friend" Virat Kohli). Endorsements are how Anushka allows herself to be choosy about the movies she does. With endorsements, she doesn't have to say yes to a shitty script to pay the bills.
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