Riya Sen is a busy actress and drives a hole through her ultra-glamourous image in Zor Lage ke Haiya in which she plays a Maharashtrian construction worker with a raw and earthy look. The children’s film with an environmental theme also stars Mithun Chakraborty and Seema Biswas and it has already won its first award – a Silver Ace Award at the Las Vegas International Film Festival. She will also soon be seen in Love Khichdi with Rituparna Sengupta, Divya Dutta and Rakhi Sawant; the portfolio movie Paying Guest with artists such as Chunky Pandey, Sayali Bhagat, Neha Dhupia, Celina Jaitley and Shreyas Talpade; the interesting Tara Sitara with Shakti Kapoor, and of course Chargesheet with Jackie Shroff and Dev Anand.
Riya is currently attracting attention with her sultry Bengali look on the cover of this month’s issue of The Man, where she is seen in a cream woollen dressing gown surrounded by a sea of candles.
Riya was recently vocal in applauding the decision to create a Cyber Crime division of the Mumbai police. Bollywood actresses are particularly vulnerable to this form of crime with close impersonators in sex scenes that are sold at a premium to MMS users – but which cause anguish at the very least and at worst could wreck an artist’s career. Riya has herself been a victim of such a crime. “The opening of a cyber crime station has become imperative in today’s tech savvy world,” she says, “Good to know that Mumbai is on the front foot in this respect.”
