Our last brush with Vidya Balan was the joyful `Shakuntala Devi` (2020), where she played the gregarious math genius with aplomb. Almost a year on, the exuberance has been replaced with an air of reticence, the teasing tone, by measured words, as Balan transforms into Vidya Vincent, the quiet forest officer in `Sherni`. For the actor, the world of the Amit Masurkar-directed film comes as a breath of fresh air.  

“Playing a forest officer was refreshing because it’s a world I am not familiar with. My interaction with this world [was through] a few safaris, and watching Animal Planet and NatGeo,” she shares. The more she read up on forest officers, the more she understood the demanding nature of the job. “I met a few forest 
officers to understand what their job entails. It was an eye-opener. They have to undergo an intense three-year course before they make the cut. When one gets a wildlife posting, they are cut off from civilisation, living in a parallel reality and are most probably away from their families. The job can be physically arduous and dangerous at times, so [the field] was traditionally male-dominated. But the women officers shared how they negotiated their way around the patriarchal mindset.”