Model Anushka Sharma doesn’t say she didn’t want to be in films.
“If I said that, I’d be a hypocrite,” she says. After a debut that others would kill for – the lead in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, directed by Aditya Chopra, opposite Shah Rukh Khan – that might be right. The 20-year-old does say, though, that she wasn’t prepared to join showbusiness at all. “I didn’t know much about how the industry works. We all have an image – a misconception, I can call it that now – about the film industry, how you have to be from a filmi khandaan to do films... I also came from the same school of thought. I always thought it wasn’t easy to do films, and not having much knowledge about it, I thought it best not to want something I didn’t know much about. I always had an open mind, though... I just never thought it would be on such a big scale.”
And the scale of it really hit her when she first went on the sets. “Before that, when I’d be rehearsing my lines with Adi, there’d be max two people around me. When I went on the sets on the first day, there were so many people... And I was like, how am I going to do this? I’d never even been on a film set otherwise – like people go and watch shootings? I’d never even done that. I was a little nervous, but, I was made to feel really comfortable, so it went off fine,” she says.
The very young Anushka Sharma narrates how she got the movie when her agency sent her pictures to the production house. “I was called for the first audition, and then the second, and then I was in,” she says. She was very young when she started modelling – all of 15 – and says that while she wasn’t thinking of a movie career, starting early might have helped. “I didn’t expect that I’d get into showbiz so early on, or at all. But beginning as a ramp model, you do gain a certain amount of confidence, and some independence. You’re working with professionals, so you have a work attitude in place,” she says. Anushka also thinks that it’s not that models are increasingly ‘becoming’ actresses – the modelling industry, she says, is a natural recruiting ground for filmmakers. “Look at it from the point of view of someone casting for a film. When you’re casting someone from outside the industry, where are you going to look? To the modelling industry, right? It’s easier for filmmakers – a model has her pictures ready, even if she’s just using them for her modelling assignments. It’s not about being groomed. Producers or filmmakers would probably go to a modelling agency or coordinator, and the people they get are models,” she says.
Anushka Sharma says she can’t comment on Aditya as a director (I have nothing to compare him to”), but as a person, she says, he makes an actor want to seek his approval, do their best. It’s Shah Rukh, however, who she says is an experience to work with. “I was a teenager when I started the film – I was 19 – and when you come in contact with people like Shah Rukh and Adi... Shah Rukh is such an intelligent person, so down-to-earth and so humble, and at the level at which he is! I told him on the last day of the shoot, ‘Shah Rukh, after my parents, you’re one of my most favourite people’.” Anushka was never a SRK fan, but she says her family is. “When they found out, everybody called, and they went, ‘(Gasp) You’re working with SRK!’ And I was like, I’m also doing a film, what about that?” she laughs.
Anushka had worked in two seasons of the fashion week in Mumbai, and her last was Fall/Winter 2008 in Delhi. The only difference she sees between the fashion sensibilities of the two cities is that “Bombay fashion’s a bit inclined towards Bollywood.”
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