![]() ![]() ![]() Where her debut film lent security and protection-precisely because of its star power-what followed next was a period of mistakes. For Khan, working with Padukone is like “working with family.” Another collaboration, Jawan, is in the pipeline for release later this year. In January, they appeared in the spy thriller Pathaan, which quickly became one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time, earning $100 million globally. Om Shanti Om broke box-office records, and the two have gone on to star in four more films together. Still, there was a sense that she was on the verge of becoming a star. Khan, who co-produced the film, concedes that when he first met Padukone, he wasn’t sure if she could pull off the role. Nevertheless, she manages to hold her own. It’s her first Hindi film, Om Shanti Om, a campy, madcap spoof of ’70s Bollywood, and Padukone has been cast alongside Shah Rukh Khan, one of the biggest superstars in the world. ![]() She’s wearing a magenta lehenga-choli, a slick bombshell bun, and full-winged eyeliner drawn to precision with killer dimples to match. Twenty-one-year-old Padukone parades down a red carpet in slow motion in a wistful romantic sequence. “So how can I marry the best of the East and the West?” While she feels fulfilled, she’s also trying to figure out what’s next. “I didn’t have a game plan for how to get here, but I didn’t see failure on my vision board,” she says. Sitting cross-legged on a couch, she contemplates her success. She’s OK with that, she tells them with a smile, and promptly asks her entourage to leave. She wants to gaze at the Arabian Sea while we talk, but the apologetic hotel staff informs her that our private room is on the other side, overlooking a construction site. We head to the Taj Lands End hotel after the shoot, where we enter through a special entrance roped off for Padukone. He’s interrupting her while she’s at work, but she giggles as the two hold hands for a brief moment. She poses effortlessly in front of the camera while her personally curated playlist blasts in the background, before her husband-the larger-than-life Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh-stops by the studio to surprise her. ![]() She’s surrounded by four bodyguards, two agents, two personal photographers, a stylist, makeup and hair artists, and a few more assistants. She has emerged from the hopes and dreams of modern Indian women: someone with the utmost freedom to choose how she lives, works, and rests.Īt the shoot, Padukone arrives early, sending the production crew into a frenzy. In Padukone, we see a quiet trailblazer who makes her own rules, all the while embodying the feminine ideal that Bollywood wants to romance. Vijay Subramaniam, Padukone’s agent, says she represents the “typical Bangalore girl”-someone with the world at their fingertips. After all, she grew up in the enterprising city of Bangalore-known as the Silicon Valley of India, and now called Bengaluru-at a time when India was undergoing economic liberalization. Padukone has been at the crossroads of all these forces, but remains unfazed. All the while, tensions simmer under the surface as a rightward-leaning Indian government monitors the stories India tells about itself on celluloid. The recent success of Telugu-language films like Bahubali and RRR has forced the question of whether Bollywood can still dominate the Indian film industry (which comprises many regional languages). At the same time, Netflix and Amazon are also eager to create content that caters to a vast South Asian viewership of nearly 2 billion people around the world.īut they are not necessarily looking only at Bollywood. Smartphones, streaming services, and social media have helped find new audiences for India’s century-old film industry, which tells about 1,500 stories a year on the screen. ![]()
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