Richa Chadha: I can reprise the role anytime

Richa Chadha

It has taken five years and three waves of the pandemic to finally take the much-awaited third instalment of Fukrey back on the floors. As Richa Chadha gears up to play the iconic part of Bholi Punjaban, she tells us, "I have missed [playing] Bholi. It is an eternally fun character to play, and can be reprised anytime."

The Fukrey 3 team playing Holi on set

The third edition picks up from where it left off in the second instalment, that saw Bholi Punjaban behind bars. She says, "In the first film, she was a drug peddler and in the next she goes to jail. Naturally, the subsequent step is to join politics. That is where the film starts again." Chadha, who has had several readings of the script and did an "exhaustive round of look tests" for the role, is proud that the makers took the right decision to push the shoot of the film owing to the pandemic. "It would have been insensitive to shoot the film in those times. The team took a call to postpone the film two weeks before the second wave hit."

Already shooting for Fukrey in the north, Chadha jokes that it would be cooler to make a Fast and Furious franchise with her character. "Bholi in Mexico, Bholi in Tokyo… [laughs]. The milieu is integral and gives it a distinct flavour to the films. For that reason alone, we had to be geographically specific," explains the actor, who recently played an honest character in Disney+ Hotstar's Great Indian Murder. "I feel characters come to me because of how I am in my personal life. An artiste brings his/her own energy to every character and modifies
it depending on the written word," she adds.