Identified defining traits of each role: Swara Bhasker on playing 9 characters in 'Mrs Falani'

Swara Bhasker in one of the avatars from the film

In August, mid-day had reported that Swara Bhasker would play nine characters in Mrs Falani (Swara has nine lives, Aug 17). The actor, and director duo Manish Kishore and Madhukar Verma took the anthology on floors in Chhattisgarh last week. While the nine short stories were originally to be shot across India, the unit will now shoot a large chunk of the project in Chhattisgarh. In an interesting development, the makers have imagined Bhasker's characters - varying from the ages of 30 to 42 - as hailing from nine different states, including West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Punjab, Rajasthan and more.

Manish Kishore

"We are creating a distinct back-story for each part, and I will sport distinct makeup, costumes and accents," begins the actor, last seen in Jahaan Chaar Yaar (2022). With a homemaker at its centre, each story studies a different facet of women's aspirations. Playing multiple roles may be a dream opportunity, but it comes with the responsibility of making each part well-defined. Bhasker says, "The best way to approach them is to identify one or two defining personality traits of each role. So, one character can be innocent or vulnerable, another is flamboyant yet repressed, while [the third] could be a bit absent-minded. That's how we have differentiated them emotionally."

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Having found their emotional graph, the next step entailed making them disparate in terms of looks. The actor turned to prosthetics to achieve it. "We have used prosthetics where we needed a significant difference [visually]. Making the mould was the scariest experience of my life. I felt as if I was being mummified," she laughs, before adding, "The nine characters come from different contexts. I am mindful of the accents - for instance, the dialects used in eastern and western Uttar Pradesh are different. Mrs Falani is one of the most challenging movies I have done. I am scared whether I'll be able to pull it off."

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For one of the roles, the actor had to get her nose pierced. "A nose piercing is [common] among Indian housewives, especially in the world that we are depicting. I didn't have the time to do it in Mumbai. So, we had a local jeweller in Raipur come on set and do it."