In a career spanning a decade, actress Nimrat Kaur has been a part of three Hindi films, before her upcoming project Dasvi. The actor, who began her career with the Vasan Bala directed Peddlers in 2012, gave her breakthrough performance with The Lunchbox (2013). A year later she did her first international project in 2014 with Homeland. Since then she has featured in Wayward Pines (2016) and the eighth season of Homeland in 2020.
It’s been six years since her last Hindi film Airlift (2016) hit the screens. Ask her if she feels that less visibility amounts to less work and she says, “What is the guarantee that if I worked in Bollywood, I would have been more successful? For me the more interesting part is the fact that how do I balance both worlds? It does worry me sometimes when I want to work and I am free and I’m not able to hack a project at that time. Because I can’t work at will, the projects that excite me need to come to me.”
At the same time, The Lunchbox actor says that she wants to do more work in India. “The films that came to me in the past few years were boring, the parts were not interesting and it was something that I had attempted before. But I want to change that. It’s a big need for me to work in India. I feel so starved of the opportunity to exploit my skills as an Indian actor. It’s a criminal situation where I have done only three Hindi films. So I really hope to correct that.”
Dasvi, which releases on Netflix and Jio Cinema, sees the actor play a homemaker who becomes the chief minister overnight when her politician husband, essayed by Abhishek Bachchan, is put behind bars. It’s easy to see that her role is inspired by former Bihar Chief Minister Rabri Devi. “Honestly, I had heard the one line of the film that she is a demure and docile lady who becomes a circumstantial politician and she gets a taste of power and what that power does to her, is what I signed up for. It was very interesting to play this character as I have never been offered a comedy film and a role where I had to put on 15 kilos.”
While in the past few years there have been a big debate about actors taking the digital route, Kaur was one of the first few actors to take the plunge on OTT in 2017 with The Test Case, an experiment that the actor says she did by her gut feeling. “I really went into it with an instinct because I had liked the story and also because I was able to play a part in a long format manual, where I don’t have any kind of restraints and have a bigger field to play. For me, the medium doesn’t really matter. I like to be a part of entertaining and strong projects,” she says.
Up next for Kaur is the second season of the Apple Original series Foundation, in which she plays the role of quantum physicist Yana. The actor says that working with Chernobly actor Jared Harris was a big high. “To play a quantum physicist is something which is really exciting as a thought (laughs). Working with Jared Harris was the biggest learning experience. I loved being on the sets as there was so much to learn. It is a color-blind, ethnicity blind casting. It is one of the richest experiences of my life. It is something that I am really looking forward to watching.”
