Actor Tabu, who fetched good reviews for her last release A Suitable Boy, talks about being in the business for 30 years, 25 years of her first National Award, and more. There’s hardly anything that Tabu hasn’t tried her hand at when it comes to portraying different characters on screen, and she so seamlessly make each one of them work, too. Not many people know that she began her career as an actor with a Telugu film, Coolie No 1 20 years ago, which later became the inspiration for David Dhawan’s Coolie No 1, again remade recently with Varun Dhawan in the lead role. And since then, there’s no genre this Padma Shri awardee hasn’t experimented with.
Excerpts from an interview as she enters her 30 years:
Timeless is one word people attach to you, after all these years. How does that make you feel?
Tabu: (laughs) I don’t know how to be otherwise. I take it as a big compliment, I don’t feel so much time has gone by.
From Prem (1995), to Golmaal Again (2017), has your reason for taking up a project changed, or you’re still the same Tabu who started off three decades ago?
Tabu: I feel I’m the same person, I don’t know how people perceive me now. More or less, my reasons to do a film, or genres have never differentiated. I started my career with films like Prem, then Hu Tu Tu, Biwi No 1 (both 1999), Hera Pheri (2000), Maqbool (2003), Haider (2014), I think it’s not been conscious or planned. Whatever the things that came my way, if I liked it and felt okay, I did it, of course provided the role is good and didn’t take away from whatever I was at that point. I want to do all genres, sometimes I might not be lucky to get films. It’s always been about different experiences with different people. It was not conscious.
