Radhika Apte plays a submissive homemaker who may or may not have killed her husband in Saali Mohabbat, a mystery-thriller currently streaming on ZEE5. She describes the film as more of a howdunnit than a whodunnit. “What intrigued me, that it’s not just a suspenseful mystery. It also explores what cracks can develop in a relationship. The question it poses is that do we really know the people we think we know? I found that relatable.”
But the big impetus to agree to the film wasn’t just limited to the idea. “The first thing that pulled me into the project was the fact that it was produced by Manish (Malhotra, fashion designer now turned producer),” she says. “He is genuinely very nice and you don’t get to say that about a lot of people in the industry.”
Saali Mohabbat also marks actor Tisca Chopra’s (Taare Zameen Par, 2007; Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, 2011) foray into direction. Radhika explains that Tisca’s emotional intelligence as an actor contributed to the film a lot. “She understood nuances and character descriptions well,” she says. “It takes a lot for an actor-turned-director to not see a performance as how they would do it but actually give other actors freedom to approach the characters on their own.” Radhika also mentions how Tisca let her figure out Smita (her character in the film) on her own. “A lot of times I asked her if I can experiment with the character and she was open to do that,” she says. “But it must be really hard. I have not been a director but as actors we have a very strict idea about how we are going to approach a character.”
What spoke to Radhika about Smita was her serenity. “I liked the portions where she was just gardening, talking to her plants. I myself have been in a quiet, calm space, so I connected with that,” she says. Contrastingly, most Hindi films these days are anything but calming. Since Animal (2023) and now Dhurandhar, bearded men executing violence and gore on celluloid has become the new normal. “I haven’t watched anything coming out of the Hindi space in a long time,” Radhika confesses. “I can’t watch it. I remember, I was watching a trailer of some film and somebody threw this man on a sink and it broke in half and I was like, I am done. This is very harmful for my mental health.”
Last year, Radhika welcomed a baby girl with her musician husband Benedict Taylor. She also has been dividing time between London to be with her family and Mumbai for work. Recently, after Deepika Padukone’s exit from Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Spirit the conversation around the need for actors’ having fixed working hours gained traction. “I have actually been fighting for it for a long time,” she says. “Now that I have a child, I can’t work beyond 12 hours, which includes hair, makeup and the actual shooting. Most men don’t see their children because they are working 14 to 16 hours. But a lot of times when I have asked for a fixed 12-hour schedule, producers have not agreed.”
If you look at Radhika’s filmography in the past few years, the output has reduced. She was once the “Netflix girl”, with many on social media quipping about how she is part of every project coming from the OTT platform. Since 2023, her work has been limited to just one film a year. She clarifies it is because she has been trying to write. Previously, there were also reports stating that the actor has been working on her debut-directorial feature Kotya, an action-fantasy about a young migrant worker who gains superpowers after a forced medical procedure. The film is going to be backed by Vikramaditya Motwane. Radhika, however, doesn’t reveal much. “I am learning script writing with a bunch of people and thus have been saying no to acting projects,” she says. We ask what she thinks of artificial intelligence (AI) and its advent into the creative fields? She seems clueless. “I am very old school. I still need my pen and paper,” she says. “I don’t even know what ChatGPT looks like. Is it an app or a website?”
