Bollywood star Deepika Padukone says role in 'Gehraiyaan' was 'raw and real'

The official trailer of Gehraiyaan, featuring Deepika Padukone, Siddhant Chaturvedi, Ananya and Dhairya Karwa, which was released by Amazon Prime on Thursday, has already attracted nearly 10 million viewers.

Padukone told the media that her role in the film was “raw and real” and she had to plunge deep within, even recalling some not-so-pleasant moments from her relationships in the past.

“I don’t think it would be possible without the comfort that he (Shakun Batra, the director) has given all of us,” she said in a media interaction. “You feel you are working in an extremely safe and secure environment because intimacy is not easy. It is not something that we have ever experienced or explored in Indian cinema before, in the way we have in this film.”

Going down that route of intimacy, of vulnerability “is only possible when you know that the director is not doing it for the eyeballs, but he is doing it because that’s just where the characters are coming from, through their journey and their experiences,” she said.

The actress said she had not done something like this before. “I have done films and a lot of characters that are love stories or relationships dramas,” she explained. “My character in Gehraiyaan is bold. But I also don’t want to say bold because (of) the way we understood bold in our films and the characters that we’ve seen. I’d say raw.”

“It is not to say that I haven’t experienced that before. But, not to this extent, where I have to really dig deep and go to the places that aren’t really that pleasant, and are not really pleasant experiences from my own life, as well as dealing with mental health issues.”