The actor says playing Saira's bond with an unusually supportive father-in-law in 1987 hit closer to home than she expected, given her own father's early death.
Aditi Rao Hydari is getting noticed for Lust Stories 3, and one relationship in her segment keeps coming up in her interviews: the bond between her character Saira and her father-in-law, played by Gajraj Rao.
The segment, directed by R. Balki, is set in 1987 and follows Saira as she works through desire, intimacy and her own creative ambitions inside a joint family. Hydari says what got her wasn't the script alone, it was what Rao and Balki did with it once the cameras rolled.
"What was written on paper was very beautiful. But obviously, when the director comes in and peppers it with their understanding of what it is, and you have an actor like Gajraj Rao in front of you, I think for me it was very tender," she said.
What struck her most, she added, was how the family treats Saira, not as property to be protected, but as someone with her own mind. "Everybody says, ये तो हमारे घर की बच्ची है, ये तो हमारी बेटी है. But to actually feel like you have a confidant in a father-in-law in 1987, I think that's absolutely wonderful," she said, calling the arrangement "almost like an ideal love story" built on affection rather than fulfilment.
A story about finding your voice
Hydari also linked Saira's arc to something bigger than one household. She sees the character's creative pursuits, dance, music, writing, whatever form it takes, as a stand-in for how women locate their own agency.
"For a girl to be able to find their courage through artistry, I find that very incredible as well," she said. "For both the husband and the father-in-law to be allies in this is so beautiful." She went further, framing that kind of support as something worth wanting outside the film too. "I find that very wonderful generally in life."
The scenes with Rao carried extra weight for her personally. Hydari's own father died when she was younger than she'd have liked, and she says that history colours how she approaches any parent-child moment on screen now.
"My father passed away much earlier than he should have. He was not well. And for me, any scene between a parent and a child then becomes very, very, it just means so much more," she said. "So it was very, very moving. It was very beautiful."
Lust Stories 3 has already put Hydari's performance in conversation with the rest of the anthology's segments, several actors from the film have been doing press rounds since release. Whether Saira's story becomes the one people keep talking about will likely depend less on the plot points and more on scenes like this one, quiet, familial, and not really about sex at all despite the title.
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