Neena Gupta, the critically acclaimed actor, is bad at pretending.
Onscreen, she disappears into women of every ilk, but IRL, she’s finding it difficult to crack the role of a poised elder celebrity—sage with her words and emotions, beatific with self-possession from a lifetime’s experience in the public eye. And she has really tried.
When we meet via a glitchy video call on a Tuesday morning in February, she tells me she’s been training herself to stop commenting on people’s weight-gain and under-eye bags because, as she recently discovered, they don’t like that. “Honesty is not a very good policy. I learnt this lesson very late in life,” she says. “Be honest with yourself; outside honesty, there is no need.” She forgot all about her new mantra again the other day, when she walked onto the set and immediately told the cameraman his lighting was terrible. “Who am I to say this? He won’t like this, na?” She waves about a little, “I still have to work on this.”
She is polite but not exactly her effusive Instagram self. “Physically, I’m a little down,” she explains. She’s sick of the dust everywhere in the city, and the night shoots… they have been gruelling. That tracks—right now Mumbai is a hellscape of construction, dug-up roads and blocked traffic, and its pervasive dusty-brownness infiltrates the mind. But I think it’s something more that is holding off Gupta. She’s a bit wary of me, or of anybody tasked with translating her to the world. How well-meaning can a person really be if they must tell your story in a way that benefits them? The actor spills the beans on being unlucky in love, trigger-happy on social media and ageing truthfully on The Nod.
