After a series of intense roles, actor Vidya Balan will show her funny side in director Raj Kumar Gupta’s Ghanchakkar. Gupta reveals that Vidya will play a quirky Punjabi woman in the film.
“Her character will be completely different from what she has played so far,” he says.
Produced by UTV Motion Pictures, Ghanchakkar is a comic thriller. The film has Emraan Hashmi as a lazy man with a taste for the finer things in life and Vidya as his ambitious wife, a woman with her own notions about the world. After making a bad decision, the couple encounters two thugs, one with a bad illness and the other with a bad attitude. The film will start shooting in September. Gupta is the only director so far with whom Vidya is working for the second time.
“While doing No One Killed Jessica (2011), I explored a different side of Vidya,” he says. “She was on my mind while I developed the script for Ghanchakkar. Thankfully, she agreed to do the role.”
It took Vidya time to agree to do the film, adds the director. “But our admiration for each other helped me make her understand how much I’m looking forward to her playing the character, which is why she finally agreed to do the film,” says Gupta.
Now the two of them are fleshing out the details of her character. “We are working on her look and mannerisms,” explains Gupta. “It will take some time to get them to fit the image I’ve conceived.” Emraan too will look different, he says. “I don’t claim that this will break Emraan’s image, but it will show him in a different light for sure.”
Ghanchakkar is a departure from the usual even for Gupta. His last two films, Aamir and No One Killed Jessica, were inspiring stories that he wanted to tell. “It wasn’t a conscious decision to do a comedy film, but as a filmmaker, I want to explore different genres,” says Gupta. “Parves Sheikh and I have written the script together. I wanted a co-writer to help me do justice to the material which is not innate to me.”
