Taapsee Pannu

With four back-to-back releases this year, she may be one of the busiest actors in Bollywood. But that doesn’t stop her from living her best life. She’s on a roll, and she’s going to make the most of it, finds Rajeev Masand

It’s Sunday morning but there isn’t a quiet moment at the Pannu residence. You can hear the sound of a domestic help pottering about in the kitchen, even as Taapsee, dressed in comfortable casuals, is finishing some business on the phone, and her flatmate, her younger sister Shagun, is attending to chores around the house.

The apartment itself, on the 12th floor of a suburban high-rise, is elegantly decorated with bric-abrac that the sisters have picked up over their frequent travels. “We did a road trip through Europe two years ago and picked up a lot of stuff then,” Taapsee reveals. Vacations are big with the Pannu sisters. This year they’ve already been to Mauritius, last year they did a diving holiday in Bali.

It’s hard to figure out how she squeezes in one or two breaks a year when she’s making four or five films annually, schlepping between Hyderabad, Chennai, and Mumbai, unwilling to give up Telugu and Tamil films even as her star continues to rise in Bollywood.

This year, Taapsee has already starred opposite Amitabh Bachchan in the hit thriller Badla, she had the home invasion thriller Game Over, and there are at least two more films coming out before the year draws to a close. On-screen she tends to play variations of the tough girl—determined, no-nonsense, outspoken, and unwilling to suffer fools.

From Anurag Kashyap and Anubhav Sinha, to Sujoy Ghosh and Shoojit Sircar, she’s worked with some of the brightest film-makers in Bollywood, and a testament to both her talent and her manner is that each of them has offered to cast her again in their next films.

Taapsee knows she’s on a roll, and she’s going to make the most of it.