Janhvi Kapoor: As an actor you need to keep pushing yourself

Janhvi Kapoor. Pic/Yogen Shah

Actor Janhvi Kapoor, on Friday, attended a masterclass held at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.

While interacting with the students, Janhvi opened up about the process of acting and the role of improvisation in acting.

"As actors, we have a very unique responsibility to give birth to a complete human being. And each human being is so specific in their baggage, memories, hopes, and desires that no two people, even if they've been brought up together in the same household, can ever have the same outlook on things.

"So, the thing is to know your character as well as possible, and then even if you're not improvising dialogues, sometimes in the middle of doing a scene, you might discover a feeling that feels very honest to who your character is, and even that can count as an improvisation," she said, according to a release.

According to her, it's extremely important for actors to keep pushing themselves.

"When you identify that as a performer you've developed crutches that you go to easily, things that you know come naturally to you, are convenient and will be liked by every director, then you should identify that you're only impressing yourself or the people in the moment. But as an actor you need to keep pushing yourself, breaking those crutches, challenging yourself, going into unchartered territories.

"For a while now, I've played slightly more vulnerable characters, perhaps even slightly backfoot characters with a lot of sincerity. I think that I've developed my go to regimen to what someone like that would be like, and just for my sake, and for what I feel like doing as an artist, I feel I want to go away from it, pivot and challenge myself. Soon hopefully," she added.

Janhvi shared her views on the sidelines of the commencement of a series of masterclasses to be held across key film and television institutes in India. These masterclasses are a part of the Letter of Engagement (LoE), signed between Amazon India and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) earlier this year.

Filmmaker Nitesh Tiwari was also present there.

Speaking about the process of casting in a film, Nitesh Tiwari said, "It's a rule which my writers and I normally follow; we do not keep any actor in mind when writing the story. All of us have certain perceptions about various actors - someone does a particular kind of role well, someone is good in action or emotional scenes - you have those perceptions, and once you keep an actor in mind, you will start writing to their strengths and start avoiding what you perceive are their weaknesses. You will never get any surprises then. And our cinema has suffered because of that because we keep on seeing actors doing the same things over and over again, and that's because the roles were written for specific actors only."

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