Talk nerdy to me! Shreya Dhanwanthary on the roles of her dreams
Shreya Dhanwanthary has played real-life heroines and make-believe molls. But underneath it all, she’s just a geek, hoping to inherit the Earth
Good things happen when Shreya Dhanwanthary gazes into the distance. In Scam 1992 (2020), her breakout role, in which she plays real-life business journalist Sucheta Dalal, that gaze means she’s uncovering Harshad Mehta’s epic stock-market fraud. In her latest Netflix series, Guns & Gulaabs, in which she plays the enigmatic femme fatale Yamini, her gaze harks back to a mysterious past shared between her and the not-quite-good cop Arjun.
Scam 1992 is set in Bombay’s Dalal street. Guns & Gulaabs plays out in Gulaabgunj, a fictional small town in the hinterlands. Dhanwanthary, 35, is clearly enjoying living in several different worlds at the same time. She’s played the cool cop Zoya in Raj and DK’s thriller series Family Man (2019) and has been popping up on the streaming and big screen ever since her debut, in the Telugu coming-of-age drama, Josh (2009), in which she played a college student.
“You know how they say that when the one who is meant for you will arrive, you’ll know? That there will be violins playing in the background? Yeah, all of that happened when I was on a film set for the first time,”Dhanwanthary says.
Stars in her eyes
Dhanwanthary grew up in Bahrain and moved with her family to Gurugram in the mid-2000s. She was in her third year of studying engineering, in 2008, when she participated in the Miss India South pageant. She was first runner up, and ended up as a finalist at Miss India in the same year.
But for much of her life, Dhanwanthary admits, she’s been an awkward, bespectacled nerd. “I’ve only got laser eye surgery done so I don’t need to wear glasses anymore,” she says. “Everything else remains unchanged.” That nerdiness now shows up in her “genre-greedy” mission – Dhanwanthary wants to play every kind of character. “I’d love to have been in a Pyaasa, Shree 420, Chori Chori; absolutely any movie starring Nutan, Nargis, or Katharine Hepburn – The Philadelphia Story, or even in movies like North By Northwest, Casablanca, All About Eve and Some Like It Hot. Those films just made you feel things, no?” she sighs. “Oh, and I’d love to play all the 12 men from Twelve Angry Men.”
With web series creating complex, immersive dramas, it’s put Dhanwanthary’s inner nerd into overdrive. “Every part of India has an unsung hero. We’ve all heard of a Rani Laxmibai. Don’t get me wrong, it would be great to play her. But I am sure there are women from every part of the country who don’t get spoken about as often. I’d love to play them,” she says. Also on her list are Amrita Pritam and Ismat Chughtai. “I am fascinated by their grit and gumption. I believe some of the most fascinating things on the planet have happened when courage was involved.”
Courage was certainly involved when the journalist Sucheta Dalal went against popular wisdom and big money to expose Harshad Mehta’s stock manipulation in 1992. Dhanwanthary recalls meeting Dalal in preparation for the role. “I was sure that whatever I would say in front of her would sound foolish,” she recalls. “She’d wonder, who is this mad person playing her on screen was.” She froze when she met Dalal in person. “I couldn’t pick anything up when I met her! But I do remember Hansal [Mehta] and I decided to make Sucheta speak faster on screen, because she was in a male-dominated field, where if she didn’t speak fast enough, she wouldn’t be heard,” Dhanwanthary says.
Here and now
Most actors are only too eager to discuss their process. Dhanwanthary, on the other hand, says she aims to live up to the effort that the team of writers, directors, cinematographers, costume, hair and make-up professionals put into helping her achieve that perfect moment in front of the camera.
Isn’t that just more pressure? “What pressure? There’s pressure when you have something to lose, and I still believe I have nothing to lose. Even today I can’t believe I get to work with the people I have grown up watching on TV,” she says. Dhanwanthary worked with director Nupur Asthana, creator of the cult favourite show Hip Hip Hurray (1998-2001), for her short, The Couple, in Unpaused: Naya Safar (2022).“I would come home from school every day and watch Hip Hip Hurray. So, imagine my excitement when I got the chance to work with the person who made it.”
This, clearly, is the best part about being an actor. The fame is secondary. The entertainment world, frankly, a little disconcerting. “It’s very common in this field, when, if you’re in a situation and someone says something funny, another person says, ‘Arrey yaar! Yeh waali dialogue na film mein mast hogi!’ (This line would be great in a film),” Dhanwanthary says. “I find that strange and jarring.” she says. There’s a constant need to perform.
It’s probably why her long and varied list of dream roles doesn’t include any performed by actors she’s met. Her worlds – real and on-screen – over intersect, but they remain separate. And one is obviously more interesting than the other. “Unless you have experienced magic through love, stories (whether through cinema or books) are the the only other way of experiencing magic on earth.”
The ’90s kid
Dhanwanthary misses the cartoons from the ’90s. “Top Cat, SWAT Kats, Tom and Jerry, Dexter, Powerpuff Girls, Captain Planet, Looney Toons—all of them were so good!” she says. “There was the animated The Jungle Book and one cartoon we watched in Bahrain that no one in India had heard of: Kimba the White Lion, a Japanese manga series.” It was also a great time for Indian TV. “Remember Just Mohabbat, Swabhimaan, Shanti, Tara and Dekh Bhai Dekh? Or even the MTV and Channel [V] VJs we had? They were stars! I loved watching Cyrus Sahukar in Semi Girebaal. Where has all that gone?”
