Regina Cassandra has been all over our screens for some time now. The actress, who was recently seen in the bilingual web series Anya’s Tutorial that released on Aha, is back with Disney + Hotstar’s Shoorveer where she plays an armed force officer. In a recent interview with us, Regina revealed what motivated her to choose Shoorveer, how she manages to jump in and out of characters, and shared her thoughts on whether the surge in the popularity of South films was long overdue.
Regina has always chosen characters that are poles apart from one another. She had made her Bollywood debut with an unusual role in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, where she played Sonam Kapoor’s on screen girlfriend, and then portrayed the role of Mrinalini Sarabhai in The Rocket Boys. So why did she choose Shoorveer? Regina answered, “I’ve never played any character that’s from the armed forces. I played with a police officer but not someone who’s in the army and I thought it would be very interesting to understand what that kind of life would that be like to dive into. Also, as an actor, I heavily rely on how my character looks. Maybe not completely rely, but it’s a big aspect to the way I work as an actor, because I feel like donning everything makes me feel even more into the skin of the character. So when I wore the uniform, I just felt one with my character. It felt interesting.”
She continued and shared, “I have really broad shoulders. The uniforms look nice on my frame. It made me feel good. And after you wear a uniform, you just like sort of straighten up and you want to be disciplined. So there was a sort of a motivation to be disciplined, to be right. All of these things made me really want to play this role.”
She also credited director Kanishk Verma and creator Samar Khan for helping her be confident about picking this role. She says Kanishk had a very clear vision, and for Samar, this was his dream world.
Regina also mentioned how she has always been fit and has taken part in a lot of adventure activities, which made it easy for her to train for her character. “I was actually running the Himalayan adventure challenge. It had a 16 km trail run with 800- 1000 m elevation. And it was interesting. My legs were cramping by the end of it. It was a 16 km trail run, plus a 14 km raft in Rishikesh. And I was training heavily for it. So I would do rock-climbing and I would do like Hill running and all of that then it definitely helped. And I am a very adventurous person in general. I am always like looking to run outdoors. I stand up paddle, so I love going to the ocean. Training for this was not a gruelling process because it’s already a process in my life. I just had to make sure I looked fit enough,” Regina stated.
Regina revealed that the past two years had been hectic as she had been juggling several roles and shuttling constantly between several places which made it intense. When we asked how she manages to play many characters in a span of a short time, the actress responded, “I don’t know if I can multitask or if I’ve mastered it yet, but I’ve always been someone who wants to do different things. I feel, as an actor, it’s actually refreshing to jump in and out of a role. At least it works for me this way- to jump out of a role and to jump into one again, because then I have a very fresh take on things. I do my work with due diligence, I do my homework on a character. And it’s not like the moment I do work on the character, I go to shoot. Sometimes, I shoot for something else and then go on to another one. So it’s interesting to come back to the character and sit with the character because now, with all of the things that I’ve put across, I write them down and I have like my notes that I keep on the side, come back, read and I feel like okay I have something fresh to add to it.”
Regina has been a part of the film industry since 2005 and is a big name in Tamil and Telugu cinema. When we asked her if she felt that the growth of the South industries, and Pan India and world audience lauding the films were a long overdue, Regina said, “It’s not about ‘Oh, it’s taking so long this is long overdue’. For change to happen, there’s a lot of things that you need to undergo. Change doesn’t just necessarily happen even in one lifetime. And something of this scale was not gonna be easy. You need to change mind set of people. It has taken films like Baahubali to actually make people understand that South cinema is capable of actually being (at par with) world cinema. But we’ve always had a lot of small budget Tamil and Telugu films that had won major laurels. And, I guess everything was just a matter of time.”
Regina would soon be seen in another Hindi web series called Farzi. Helmed by Raj and DK, the series also stars Shahid Kapoor, Vijay Sethupathi and Raashi Khanna.
