50 Shades Of Huma Qureshi

She is Miss Monica. She is Tarla. She is Rani Bharti. Meet the woman of many characters

- Ananya Ghosh

Over the last one decade, Huma Qureshi, who had made a stunning debut as Mohsina in the 2012 Anurag Kashyap masterpiece, Gangs of Wasseypur, has consistently proven her range through her layered and nuanced performances. The recent outings of this chameleon actor include the sultry and conniving secretary Monica Machado in Monica, O My Darling, the village bumpkin-turned state CM Rani Bharti in Maharani, and of course, the warm and simple homemaker turned-culinary queen, Tarla Dalal, in the eponymous biopic Tarla.

"As an actor, I always follow the script and try to stick to the director's vision. I don't physically resemble her but I wanted to ensure that I captured her spirit and the sheer joy of cooking that she could instill in people. I have seen her shows while growing up. I didn't want to mimic her. I tried to capture the essence of Tarla Dalal," says the actor as we sit down for this interview.

Further elaborating how she got into the skin of the character, she says, "I find her to be a feminist in her own right someone who encouraged other women to dream big and never give up, irrespective of the stage of life that they were in. I found that quality to be admirable. Her ability to make cooking look easy is something that I found endearing. It took me some time to understand how a woman in the '70s would have tried to overturn patriarchal norms in her own way. I wanted that to come across in the way I played her".