Having carved a niche for himself among the urban multiplex-going audience with films like Being Cyrus (2006), Cocktail (2012) and Finding Fanny (2014), filmmaker Homi Adajania is gearing up for the release of his debut web series, Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo. What makes it different from his previous works is that this time, he has penetrated deep into the hinterlands to tell the story of a bunch of women connected by familial ties running a drug cartel. But the one thing that has remained constant in his filmography is veteran actor, Dimple Kapadia. The director-actor duo had first collaborated on Homi’s maiden outing, Being Cyrus, and over the years, she has been a part of all his projects. Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo is no different. The series sees her playing the powerful, fierce, and bold Rani Ba, a matriarch spearheading a cocaine factory under the garb of a handicraft business.
Homi, recently, revealed that Tabu was his first choice to play Rani Ba but Dimple was destined to be a part of the show. And now, in a freewheeling chat with News18, he talks about how he ends up working with Dimple every single time. “I love her to pieces. I think she fits into everything I make. She’s fantastic, both on and off-set. It’s not like I’m making my second or third film with her. Now that so much time has passed, I feel things will be incomplete without her,” he tells us exclusively.
Homi jokes that Dimple’s ‘wrath’ often gets the best of him and he has no choice but to cast her in his projects. “I don’t have a choice. I have to cast her in everything because I’m extremely scared of her. She calls me and tells me, ‘I know you’re doing this project and you better put me in it.’ My voice goes a little high-pitched, my breath gets up and I say ‘done’. I can’t bear to face her wrath,” he says with a laugh.
Lauding Dimple, the Angrezi Medium (2020) director says that despite decades of experience behind her and winning wide acclaim, she carries no baggage of seniority. Sharing an anecdote, he remarks, “She’s a very accommodating actor. She doesn’t get into anyone’s business. She does her own stuff. But one day [during the shoot of Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo], she really felt that she didn’t perform the way she could have and asked us to redo that take.”
He continues, “I told her that we would complete the scene and then do it but it wasn’t communicated to me that it still needs to be done. Poor thing, she felt really bad about it but she redid the scene and nailed it and hit it out of the park. She didn’t let that opportunity go.”
But it’s the Pathaan (2023) and Tenet (2020) actor’s resilience despite the troughs and the crests in her life that makes her Homi’s favourite. Speaking about it, he says, “What’s really crazy about her is the life she has lived. Everyone knows about it. Not that I’m the sanest person in the room but sometimes I ask her how on earth she manages to do what she does. One day during the shoot, she told me, ‘I look at my life as one big fat Hindi movie.’ And I can vouch for that.”
Homi goes on to elaborate, “Sometimes, I see the pressure that she’s under because of various things, like certain milestones in her life may have been tragic or phenomenal. But she hasn’t changed since I met her during Being Cyrus. Things in her life have fluctuated like a seismograph from hell but she has the ability to let things bounce off her.”
But not everybody knows that underneath all the resolution and grit lies a Dimple, which not many are familiar with. Giving a glimpse into that part of her life, Homi explains, “It’s not like she isn’t sensitive to it; she has absolutely absorbed them. She’s very evolved in that sense. She has the ability to live and let live. It’s an incredible quality. She loves having and if she has a day off the next day, she’ll go quite nuts the night before!”
Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo also stars Radhika Madan, Angira Dhar, and Isha Talwar along with Ashish Verma, Varun Mitra, Udit Arora, Deepak Dobriyal, and Monica Dogra in key roles. It is all set to release on May 5 on Disney+ Hotstar.
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