Vivek Agnihotri’s The Vaccine War is being touted as India’s first ‘bio-science’ film. The low budget film traces how India’s scientists fought all odds to create the country’s first indigenous vaccine against the Covid-19 virus during the pandemic. Raima Sen plays a journalist named Rohini Singh Dhulia in the film, who serves as the film’s primary antagonist as a woman who is convinced ‘India can’t do it’. In an exclusive interaction with DNA, the actress spoke about the need for the role and how she prepared for it.
Talking about how her character represents the people who doubted Indian scientists’ ability, Raima says, “There were two kinds of people – ones who believed India can do it and ones who were convinced India can’t. This character is one of the latter. She is a very strong woman in her own right, who honestly believes India can’t do it because the country has never managed such a feat before. In every walk of life, there are such people. So it makes sense for the film to show this side of thought too.”
While the film is based on real events, Raima’s character is fictional and works for a fictional news outlet called The Daily Wire. Raima says she referenced a real journalist for mannerisms and to see how journalists talk but did not base it on any real person. “I did Google journalists’ videos to get a hang of how they talk. I googled some videos of Faye D’Souza and how she talks to get an idea of how journalists present. But that was about, to get a reference of how a journalist would talk. I made this role my own apart from that,” she tells us.
Raima says that the script was such that she did not need to base the character on any real journalist. “You take the references and then make it your own. I studied how journalists should be talking. But otherwise, the role was written very well and the dialogue is so powerful that I didn’t have to do much,” she says.
The Vaccine War stars Nana Patekar, Pallavi Joshi, Sapthami Gowda, Girija Oak, Nivedita Bhattacharya, and Anupam Kher. The film released on September 28 to largely positive reviews but had a low opening at the box office.
