Charu Shankar played the role of Ranbir KapoorMother of Vanga’s ‘Animal’ director Sandeep Reddy, she was recently seen playing the character of Ananya Pandey’s mother in ‘Chand Mera Dil’. Talking about his character and experience working in the film, Charu shared in an exclusive interview with ETimes.Talking about her character, Charu said, “I play Nivedita Prasad, a single mother, a Bharatanatyam dancer and a woman whose struggle, resilience and journey through the art becomes the emotional core of her daughter Chandni’s character, played by Ananya Pandey. Played by Ananya Pandey. Handling everything on her plate at such a young age. One very funny thing we discovered was that none of us knew how to cook everyday Indian food. There is a scene in the film where our characters are cooking bhindi while casually having a serious conversation. The problem was, none of us had ever cooked bhindi in our lives! At the end of the shoot, we accidentally created what can only be described as ‘bhindi soup’. We challenged the crew to taste it later and no one stepped up!”Interestingly, Charu is playing a Bharatanatyam dancer in the film and has studied the dance form for the role, she further said, “For me, Bharatanatyam became the emotional key to understanding Nivedita, because the dance form itself teaches endurance with grace. You are physically tight in aramand (half squat), you have to keep burning your hand and muscles your face. Expressing elegance, control and emotional clarity. In my background for Nivedita, I imagined that this shaped the way I moved through adversity. I learned mudras, abhinaya, nattuvangam, jatis in Adi Taalam, and even learned how to teach a Bharatanatyam class,” said Charu.Charuk’s role as Jyoti, a calm and caring mother in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s ‘Animal’ won her a lot of appreciation. Asked about his memories on the sets of ‘Animal’, he said, “The crowd was really great. Sandeep, with his keen focus on the story and his superior filmmaking style, was still very open to discussing the finer nuances of my character’s arc. Anil Kapoor it is an absolute gem. Almost all of my scenes were with him, and we spent a lot of time building detailed backstories for our characters so that we could fully understand how these two people got to the moments we see in the film. And Rashmika is very funny, we also had many scenes together. We were both due to go on vacation overnight, and of course that was the day the shoot was delayed, so when our shot finally arrived, we were quickly zooming out into such super focus that we got it all in one shot! I look forward to meeting them all for the sequel. Watching them at work made me realize that great actors are like race cars: built with precision, quietly waiting and able to go from zero to hundred in seconds, the moment someone calls action.”“It was my first time with the Animal stars, and I found everyone, especially Ranbir, incredibly warm and generous as an actor. There’s a lot of waiting between takes, so the actors spent a lot of time together, and very quickly found that we all got along really well. We discussed favorite foods and vacation destinations, our character workout routines, and when Ran was born. We saw ‘Animal’ filming and adorable pictures of her babies. Ranbir was always on top of the latest shows, and praised my performance in ‘Delhi Crime 2’, which had just released at the time,” added Charu.Apart from ‘Animal’ and ‘Chand Mera Dil’, Charu was also seen in projects like ‘Delhi Crime season 2’, ‘Rocket Boys 2’, ‘Crew’, ‘Binny and Family’ to name a few.
