Chhapaak: Deepika Padukone says no one recognised her when they shot in Delhi, calls it ‘liberating’

Deepika Padukone claims she did not think about her looks even once while working on Chhapaak.

Bollywood actor Deepika Padukone will be seen as an acid attack survivor in Meghna Gulzar’s Chhapaak. She has said that the idea of having to “let go of looking a certain way” did not cross her mind while working on the film in which she has used heavy prosthetics to make her face look like an acid attack survivor.

Deepika Padukone plays acid attack survivor Malti in Chhapaak.

Speaking with Anupama Chopra in an interview, Deepika said, “As far as the look is concerned and dropping it all, I am being asked about it everywhere. But it is not something that crossed my mind at all. Ever. When Meghna came to me last year, I was in a completely different headspace. I had gotten out of Padmaavat. I was looking at doing something contemporary, in Yeh Jawaani or Cocktail space. So she comes home, opens her laptop and starts narrating. In two pages, I was like I am doing this film and she was like ‘Really?’ I said I found my next film, that’s it. Then she started talking about something completely different and then in the middle of that conversation, she was like ‘can I give you a hug?’ It took her that much time to digest, because somewhere in her mind, she was like ‘we will try, she will say no but we will try’. She didn’t want to live with the regret of not having tried.”

Deepika further added that vanity never crossed her mind. “Through the entire process, not once did I think of it from vanity perspective, or how am I going to shed having looked a certain way or how the audience is going to react. I was thinking about the practicality of it all. There are so many stages to this, how are we going to achieve it. I have never done a prosthetic film, never done a prosthetic-heavy film before and I have never played a real life, living character before. I had these things in my mind. Are they going to make me look like Laxmi or are they going to make me look like Deepika who had go through something like this? Those were the technical things I had in my mind,” she said.

“When we got the final look, I was tired of the entire process and slept in my chair. When I got up and saw myself in the mirror, I felt completely like myself. I told Meghna that and she was that is what the film is about. It beyond what you see in the mirror,” she added.

She also claimed being able to not look like Deepika was liberating. “It was so liberating, it was so liberating because people did not recognize me. We were shooting in Delhi and of course later the news spread that this film is being shot and I am there. Anywhere we were shooting, I could go without being recognized. People would look at me, they were curious about my face but did not recognize me,. Some people were like, is it her, is it not her. It was liberating because it has been a while since I have been able to just go out like that,” she added.

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