Top Gun

Fear has no place in self-styled movie star, feminist and truth-bomber Kangana Ranaut’s narrative. In her first interview with elle, she tells Mayank Shekhar why you can’t stop at the top.

- Mayank Shekhar

Although Kamlesh, who had come down from Chicago to try her luck in Bollywood, was pretty much Kangana Ranaut’s mother’s age, they shared the Asha K Chandra’s working girls’ hostel in Juhu—a popular orientation school for beginners in Bollywood.

One evening in early 2005, Kamlesh and Ranaut stepped out to catch Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black at a neighbourhood theatre. As Ranaut recalls, “When I saw Rani Mukerji perform, I told Kamlesh aunty, ‘I can do this.’ She tried to calm me down, took me out for dinner to the JW Marriott hotel, and we talked at length about what I had said. Kamlesh aunty eventually laughed hysterically at the thought that I could actually act like Rani in Black.”

“It was hurtful. But was she right? Was I being delusional? That night I came home, stood in front of the mirror, imagining it to be the camera, and repeated scenes from the film—trying to be blind, using sign language, making blank faces and sounds, choking myself in such a way that I wasn’t actually choking myself… I knew I could do this.”

Given that I’d planned to have a conversation with Ranaut, 29, that would cover various turning points in her life that have led her to where she is now—a bona fide Bollywood star—I asked if Kamlesh aunty’s taunts that night didn’t count as the trigger. She was 18 then, living on her own, working as a part time model in Mumbai, auditioning for roles in films.

“That was one instance, yes,” she says. Bhansali’s Black, quite literally a dark film, which centred on the female character, gave Ranaut hope: “Around that time, the film industry was dominated by beauty queens, item numbers and female leads who hardly got three proper scenes.”