Vidya Balan On Being Called A 'Female Hero'

Vidya Balan doesn’t take the ‘female hero’ tag too seriously. For her, the story is what matters.

- Priyanka Bhadani

It is the first Monday after Kahaani 2: Durga Rani Singh hit theatres. We are meeting Vidya Balan, the lead actor of the film, at a five-star hotel in the Mumbai suburbs. There has been a buzz about her strong performance. Critics are calling her ‘the hero’ again. Balan’s character Vidya Sinha/Durga Rani Singh looks dreary in the film, but the actor lights up the screen with her power-packed performance. Not many actors would be willing to portray an eccentric character, especially after being away from the screen for a while and when the prior releases haven’t been that successful.

“My choices have been a bit... (pause) off-beat, if that’s the word we want to use,” says Balan, while settling down in the balcony of the hotel with the setting sun, sea and palm trees in the background. Balan chooses to sit there after we got her out of the conference hall, where she had spent the last couple of hours giving interviews, for clicking pictures. She was feeling claustrophobic inside, she says.

Coming back to her latest release, Balan says she felt compelled to tell the story that director Sujoy Ghosh brought to her. “It was a tough film for me to do. I needed that rest before I dealt with something like this,” she says, justifying the gap between her last release, Te3n that came out in June, and Kahaani 2. “I took a few months off. Ever since I had become an actor, I don’t think I had given myself any time. And when I gave myself time, I felt fully energised.”

The stories drive her. She wants to live different people’s lives, and that is why she hasn’t hesitated from doing a character who looks ordinary. “Looking good is very subjective,” says Balan. “When people say you are looking so simple, so drab on-screen, I look at them and think how I didn’t, even for a moment, think that I am not looking nice.”