New Delhi, India

Adah Sharma always wanted to play a double role so when she was offered to play Reeta Sanyal in a new show on Disney+ Hotstar where she gets to play 10 or more characters, she couldn’t believe her luck. From 1920 to The Kerala Story and now Reeta Sanyal, Adah Sharma believes that destiny has better plans for her than she could have ever imagined or manifested. 

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Reeta Sanyal started streaming on the OTT platform from October 14 onwards and Adah Sharma is happy with how her life has panned out so far. Busy with projects and getting to essay distinctively different roles so early on in her career, Adah Sharma opens up about not missing out on Bollywood masala flicks, a genre she’s most comfortable with working on and much more. 

Here are the edited excerpts of our chat: 

Q: Who is Reeta Sanyal?

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Adah: Who is she not? I think I've lost track now. She's a lawyer and a detective. When she’s a detective, she is in disguise – with different hair, makeup, different body language, different accents. The show is a fantasy adventure. It's larger than life. 

Adah Sharma

Q: Your filmography is unlike any other peer of yours. What are some things you look for in a project before saying yes?

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Adah: I think I'm fortunate that I started with 1920, which was a horror movie where people saw me really different from what I am in real life. I mean, I play a possessed person. So it made people a lot more open to seeing me doing things differently. Then after Kerala Story, Sunflower, Bastar – I think people have trust in me, that if it's a project where there's an extremely different role, then let's take Adah for it. I like that I’m being offered projects that have well-written roles for the female character.

Q: What’s something we don’t know about you?

Adah: I can fly when no one's looking (hahaha….)

Q: I’m intrigued, do you not fear missing out on big blockbuster films because you’d be stereotyped as a serious and intense actress? 

Adah: I think you could say that after The Kerala Story and Bastar but then with Sunflower, I'm playing a bar dancer in it. In Sunflower, I play this almost overtly sexual, voluptuous, hot, commercial-looking bar dancer. I don’t think there’s any more masala than this. 

As for intensity, that’s a good thing. Even with comedy, intensity is good because it just gets your point across. So I'm all for intensity but as far as masala and commercial Bollywood movies are concerned, Reeta Sanyal is almost like the showreel for that. 

Q: So can we expect to see you in an out-and-out song and dance film soon? 

Adah: I'm trying to do all the stuff I've not done before and I am all for it. I have graduated in Kathak. In fact, when I joined films, I thought I would only be doing films with songs and dance. I've not got a dance film yet that's released but I look forward to doing different genres. 

I'm pretty intuitive. If there’s a great role then I just take it up. I don’t plan things because it takes away the whole joy. It would kill the whole point of why I started doing movies in the first place. 

Q: You’ve done action, horror, crime…what’s one genre that feels like home?

Adah: I enjoy doing comedy. I don't know, I enjoyed doing intense roles too. All of them seem home now. I started with horror and I hadn't done anything before. It seemed like home to me. I'm very comfortable with all genres actually. Maybe dance, since I am trained formally.  

Listen to the full interview of Adah Sharma with WION here: