Tamannaah Bhatia on ‘Jailer’, ‘Jee Karda’, ‘Lust Stories 2’ and Vijay Varma

Tamannaah Bhatia chats about her belated homecoming to Bollywood, working with superstar Rajinikanth in ‘Jailer’, and dating a sneakerhead

Tamannaah Bhatia is everywhere. Two weeks ago, she took centre stage in Jee Karda, a hip, dawdling series that has drawn an impressive number of viewers on Prime Video. This week witnesses the release of Lust Stories 2 on Netflix, where she stars opposite Vijay Varma. (The actors, Tamannaah confirmed in an earlier interview, paired off on the film’s sets and have been dating ever since).

The actor’s southern roster remains as taut as ever: four years after her last Tamil appearance in Action, she stars alongside Rajinikanth for the first time in Jailer. She is also foraying into Malayalam cinema with the Dileep-led — and Bollywood-inflected — gangster film Bandra. “Since the age of 14, when I started acting, I have never discriminated between languages,” says the HappyDays, Ayan and Baahubali actor. “I was ‘pan-India’ before it was even a term.”

Excerpts from an interview...

Jee Karda — about seven close-knit friends navigating relationships and adulthood — felt like it was skimming the surface simply because it had to be packaged as a fun and light-hearted show. Do you agree with this criticism?

Not at all. The writers (Arunima Sharma, Hussain Dalal and Abbas Dalal) have focussed on giving a real perspective on what life is. Friendship is one space in life where we can behave in the best and worst possible way, and be our authentic selves. Take for instance the bathtub scene where my character, Lavanya, is laughing and crying at the same time. She is reacting without any filter. With friends, there are many happy and light-hearted moments as well as the deeper aspects of interpersonal relationships, which we have also shown. So it is a mix of both.

Was there a scene in the series that resonated with you personally?

It’s the moment where Lavanya flips out because her boyfriend has brought home the wrong ice cream. In the 2004 Telugu film Anand, written and directed by Sekhar Kammula, the girl calls off the marriage over a saree. In life, we often have some very big fights over trivial things but the problem is not that trivial thing. The problem is a pendulum of so many unaddressed issues that manifests itself in something small and disconnected. There is an entire back-end of emotions triggering it. In this case, it’s Lavanya’s mounting confusion and the layers of superficiality and compromise she suspects in her relationship. I found it to be a realistic portrayal, not a cinematic one.