Sheeba Chadha has been managing her career between films and OTT, taking up meaty and substantial roles on each. While she loves doing intense and dramatic roles, the actor admits that comedic roles, like the one she played in her recent web seres Bakaiti, she feels happier.
“I have a clown inside of me. I wish I was more childish, but I am more of a clown. I just wish I get more work where the clown in me comes alive,” she laughs.
With her recent show being an addition to the list of small-town family stories on the web, ask Sheeba Chadha what makes such stories so appealing to her as an artiste and she says, “It’s a lot of fun. When I used to do these small skits about mother-daughter or mother-son relationships, I wouldn’t get to know when the work would start and end. There is so much ease in the writing, and it even lands easy; that is lovely. It used to be slice-of-life quite literally as the sketch would show the bhasad of life. Bakaiti was like a bigger version of that.”
Up next, Sheeba has one of the biggest films ever made in Bollywood in her kitty, filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayanastarring Ranbir Kapoor, Sai Pallavi and Yash. It is reported that she will play Manthara in it. When mentioned the scale of the project, she shares, “I never thought of all this. Actually, my dates weren’t working out initially for the film. I almost didn’t [do it].” The actor adds, “It’s great to be a part of something that has such big names attached to it as it is good for your work profile, but as an actor, you just go and do your work. My role is quite a small one and I just feel fortunate to have got the chance to play that.”
Many character actors from Bollywood have found delayed success in the industry in the last few years, especially due to OTT. Sheeba is one of those actors. Talking about it, she says, “There is no regret because fame was never something that was my goal. Today, fame and everything just explodes, but when we started, it wasn’t certainly a thing. I would think that it is reserved for other big people. I wouldn’t associate it with myself. But I would be lying if I don’t say that there were certain roles that I feel would have been so fun if I would have got the chance to play them.”
But does the complexity in characters on OTT help artistes like her achieve success today? “It can happen anywhere, you can get a fairly complex character on any medium. For me, in Badhaai Do, I had a very complex character, it wasn’t simple at all. It’s just that in OTT, you have more time to show that complexity, while films give you lesser time to do that. It all depends on how well the character is written. It all boils down to that,” she responds.