At The Paradise's Mumbai press meet, the actor pushed back on the idea that mother roles end careers, pointing to Dil Chahta Hai as proof.
Sonali Kulkarni has played a mother on screen before. Twenty-six years ago, in fact, when she was cast as Hrithik Roshan's mother in Mission Kashmir. At the Mumbai press meet for The Paradise, where she plays Nani's mother, someone inevitably asked the question actors like her get asked a lot: doesn't a mother role, especially early in a career, box an actress in?
Her answer was pointed.
"I get quite astonished that audiences are okay when male actors play diverse kinds of roles," she said, according to Bollywood Hungama. "However, when a heroine essays the role of a mother, people are shocked and they say, 'Arre, maa ka role kar rahi hai.' Initially, I used to fight with this perception."
She had the filmography to back it up. Right after Mission Kashmir, she signed Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya and then Dil Chahta Hai, both released in 2001. "Its makers knew what I was doing in Mission Kashmir," she said, making the point that nobody in the industry actually slotted her into a single kind of part because of one film.
Kulkarni also talked about what the label "mother" flattens. "There's beauty in growing up," she said. "There are other mothers as well, who are very frustrated or have faced betrayal or who are single mothers. Yet, for us, the purity in a mother is the ultimate thing. I take it as a compliment as, after 26 years, I am back to being a mother."
The part in The Paradise gives her a lot more screen time with her on-screen son than Mission Kashmir did. "In Mission Kashmir, I just had one scene with Hrithik," she said. "Here, I have no complaint because Nani and I are in several scenes. I won't say that we had fun, but we enjoyed our scenes because they were filled with emotions. It was like a jugalbandi."
Kulkarni was at the press meet alongside Nani, Raghav Juyal and Kayadu Lohar, part of the cast for a film that's already drawn attention this week for its adult certificate, which Nani has been defending in the same round of interviews. Kulkarni's remarks were a smaller, quieter thread from the same event, one actor's long-running argument with an industry habit rather than news about the film's content.
The Paradise opens in cinemas on September 24. Whether audiences read Kulkarni's mother as one of the "pure" ones she described, or something messier, is the kind of thing reviews will settle within a day of release.
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