In her new Tomb Raider-style movie, Nandana Sen, whom we recently saw in Rang Rasiya, leaps across two skyscrapers on a motor-bike as well as having had to learn kick-boxing, shooting and taekwondo. “I suffer from vertigo,” she says, “They said I didn’t have to do it. They were willing to use a body double. But I’m glad I took the leap. It helped me to overcome my vertigo. I knew how to ride a bicycle. So learning to ride a mo-bike wasn’t that hard. But it wasn’t an easy thing to speed across from one 30-storey building to another. It was liberating. The movie had a very Matrix-like look. It was wonderful to take up such a challenge.” The film also stars Vivek Oberoi.
The Bengali-born actress, who is the daughter of nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen, is known in the UK for her work on the TV series Sharpe – the episode called Sharpe’s Peril was set in India. She has also appeared in two very interesting and greatly under-rated movies in parallel cinema – Strangers and The World Unseen.
Nandana’s next movie is Vicky Chopra’s Seasons Greetings. “I play this really fun character,” she explains, “I haven’t done comedy before. It’s quite a far cry from my role in the film with Vivek. There I was speeding across skyscrapers. Here hopefully audiences will be falling off their chairs watching my comic act.”
Nandana is very socially aware and has worked with UNICEF and UNIFEM to raise awareness of sexual child abuse. When living in Boston, she interacted closely with victims of such abuse and even ran a teen crisis hotline. “Words cannot describe the satisfaction one feels bringing about awareness in Society of such a problem on a larger scale,” she explains.
