Dubbing for a star as recognisable as Kareena Kapoor Khan sounds like it should be straightforward. Get the pitch close, match the energy, done. Parvathy Thiruvothu found out otherwise while voicing Kareena's character Ajooni Kohli for the Malayalam version of Daayra, and she's been unusually candid about how the whole thing came together.

Her starting point wasn't imitation. "The idea is to be true to the actor's performance," she said, explaining that she chased the emotional truth of Ajooni rather than trying to sound like Kareena. Still, she admits the job wasn't easy given who she was dubbing over. "Kareena has an extremely distinct and recognisable voice and screen presence," Parvathy said.

Here's the funny part. Despite not trying to copy anything, some of it slipped in anyway. She noticed that certain English lines she delivered ended up sounding close to Kareena's own cadence, purely by accident. Her method, as she describes it, was to match the decibel levels and intonation first and let the rest of the performance settle around that.

The technical grind

Ask anyone who's done dubbing and they'll tell you the real fight isn't with the voice, it's with the mouth. Parvathy laid out the problem in detail: getting the lip sync right so the Malayalam track doesn't look out of step with the original Hindi performance. The start and end of every mouth movement had to line up, and even the shape of the mouth mid-line mattered. She called it a strange thing to have to obsess over while also trying to act.

One scene gave her more trouble than the rest. In it, Ajooni is listening to someone recount an incident, and has to deliver a line signalling the questioning is over, a moment where her voice cracks in what Parvathy described as a delicious way. Replicating that crack, that exact texture of the moment, turned out to be the hardest thing to pull off across the whole dub.

Interestingly, Parvathy never got on a call with Kareena for any of this. Her real reference point was director Meghna Gulzar, with whom she spoke at length about the film and the character. Gulzar, she said, gave her a solid grounding in why the film was shaped the way it was, which fed directly into how she approached the dub.

Daayra also stars Prithviraj Sukumaran and is set for a theatrical release on September 18, arriving in a week already crowded with big titles. Whether audiences clock the dubbing craft at all once they're watching the finished film is a different question. But for Parvathy, getting the mouth shapes and the voice crack right clearly mattered more than getting the accent to match.