Good Girl Gone Rogue

Blurred comfort zone boundaries, an unassailable dedication to hard work, and a bold leap past her preconceived range - this is not the Shraddha Kapoor you thought you knew. 

 

- Dhvani Solani

When I get on to a call with our November cover girl on a Sunday afternoon just before the long weekend of Diwali, I expect to find a trademark cheerful, slightly hesitant, faintly giggly, and entirely diva-free voice on the other end. Like I have before.

However, in her place, I find a sombre Shraddha Kapoor who apologises for having an off day. The entirely unseasonal and worrying rumble of the thunder of the October afternoon in Mumbai seems mirrored in her inflection as she tells me how her physiotherapist was suspecting a hairline fracture in her foot the previous afternoon. Thankfully though, it turned out to be only “a deep sprain” as revealed by her X-ray reports that came in the day before, also when our original phone call was due.

I found myself wondering what it would be like if the tables were turned. If under those circumstances, I had to give an interview, or make an appearance, or sit in a make-up chair for hours, when all I wanted to do was probably just Netflix and chill.

But I’m the one with the questions here, so I dive right in: Is this the end of seeing Kapoor as the girl we’ve always seen her as – beautiful, fragile, vulnerable, the good girl playing the good girl, even if she is terminally ill in the script or body popping at a hip-hop battle? The last time we saw her on screen, she was playing the gangster godmother of Nagpada in Apoorva Lakhia’s Haseena Parkar. The next time we see her, it’ll either be in the bilingual Saaho for which she is learning Telugu, or in the biopic on Saina Nehwal for which she is undergoing a rigorous crash course in badminton, 34 sessions down and many more to go.