Among the joys of starring in a period drama is embracing characters far removed from oneself. Saiee Manjrekar, who has attempted her first period drama in The India House, said she had to work hard on her diction and dialogue delivery as she stepped into the role of Sati.
“Working on a film based in a different era is interesting. It makes you observe things differently as an actor, because everything — from the way people spoke to how they expressed emotions — was so different. For Sati, I worked on the dialect because the tonality had to feel true to that time and not too modern,” said Manjrekar of Ram Vamsi’s directorial venture that is set in pre-independence India.
The change extended to her body language too. She explained, “Even something as small as eye contact, and the way a woman carried herself in that time had a certain lehza. We had to consciously work on that.” The India House has been shot in Hindi and Telugu.
