Bollywood is a world in its own: Paprika Steen

It can only happen in a film festival — the top actress of a nation roaming around like an average film buff and loving it too! It was quite the same with top Danish actress Paprika Steen as After Hrs spotted her panting in the Mumbai heat on the steps of Fun Cinemas.

She is a VIP delegate at the MAMI(Mumbai Academy of Moving Image) Film Festival.
“I have come to MAMI for the screening of my film Applaus which is about a top actress dwindling away into loneliness, depression and alcoholism. The film has been produced by my husband (Mikael Rieks) and directed by first-time director and my friend Martin Peter Zandvliet,” says Paprika, the first Danish actress since Karin Nellemose in 1949 to win both Best Actress (for Okay) and best supporting actress (Open Hearts) in the same year at the Robert Festival, the Danish equivalent of the Oscars.

“My son Otto Leonardo Steen Rieks (nine years) is also in the movie. He is playing my eldest son in the movie. And no, he is not training to be an actor. He wants to be a soccer player.” We quickly veer towards Bollywood and Paprika admits that she is catching up on Bollywood films in her hotel rooms. “I can rattle off the top names in this country and say that I love them so much but the truth is, I am yet to see a sizeable number of films to comment on any actor. But Bollywood films seem to have a world of its own. And you need to go through some conditioning before you kind of appreciate them. You guys don’t smooch, don’t make love but still manage to portray everything so beautifully,” she says.

The most difficult part of being in Mumbai is the heat which is preventing her from going out. “I am feeling so down that I am not able to venture out because it’s so hot out here. I want to go out. For people like us, who have come here from a country like Denmark, Mumbai is a strange experience because this is for the first time I am here in this part of the globe. It’s a kind of romance — the people, the slums and adjacent highrises, the food — that transforms you into a world which you thought never existed,” she says in a single breath. She also reveals that she will soon be seen in a spooky British film called Skeletons. So, what’s on her agenda tomorrow? “Well, I am going to the market tomorrow and find out things for myself. I have not been introduced to anybody from here and I am going to complain that I am feeling lonely here so I am introduced to some fabulous actors from Mumbai,” she ends.

Who’s Paprika?
Paprika Steen is the daughter of musician and conductor Niels Jorgen Steen and the actress Avi Sagild. She is the sister of musician and actor Nikolaj Steen. Steen applied to the Acting School of Odense Theatre 13 times before being accepted and attending there (from 1988 to 1992).