Bollywood
Shibani Bedi shares if she had any apprehensions before signing Thank You For Coming and reveals she drew empathy for her role as single mother from her parents.
Updated : Oct 13, 2023, 10:06 PM IST | Edited by : Riya Sharma
The popular content creator and actress Shibani Bedi recently enthralled the audience with her performance in Rhea Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor’s sex comedy film Thank You For Coming which also starred Bhumi Pednekar, Dolly Singh, Shehnaaz Gill, and Kusha Kapila along with others in key roles.
Shibani Bedi essayed on the role of a single mother who is always there for her dysfunctional friends, is ambitious, and an independent woman building a good life for her daughter. The actress recently got in an Exclusive conversation with DNA India and talked about her experience working in the film and revealed that she drew empathy from her parents for her role in the movie.
When asked about her experience working in Thank You For Coming, Shibani Bedi said, “I feel like, we have put our sole in the characters that we are playing in Thank You For Coming. This has probably been the most interesting journey for me. I had a great time on set. It was a very inclusive, funny, intelligent bunch of people on set who were also collaborating with the actors. So you know, there was a lot of inclusivity, when it came to making this movie and giving the character our body and soul, Bhut maza aaya mujhko frankly.”
When asked if the actress took inspiration from any single mother for her role, the actress said her co-star and on-screen daughter Sonali made it easy for her to adapt to the character and said, “The thing is that the single mother aspect of my character is one bucket of her life. She is also a thirty-year-old single independent woman who is trying to be a good friend to her dysfunctional friends, she is also a dysfunctional person herself who is trying to learn things as she goes along as she is also young. There were a lot of other spectrums to the character. I think the single-mother aspect became easy to be with because a) I had to give it to Sonali, who plays my daughter, because a lot of the time, I was reacting and drawing energies from what she would bring to the table as a girl who is being shamed for having a viral video of her with a boy in a compromising position. And I feel like I had a great bond with her, she is quite younger than me and he brought my big sister energy very easily, because of which the protectiveness and the emotions towards her came very instinctively and naturally.”
She further added that she drew empathy from her parents for her role and said, “In terms of the emotional spectrum of being a single mother aspect, I feel like I drew a lot of empathy from the time when I hurt my parents and they have felt helpless, yet protective and yet angry towards me and towards the situation, where they question themselves and their parenting but still shown up for me. So I drew a lot of empathy from that, I feel children create a lot of trouble for their parents. And there are moments when during their helplessness, or their sad moments, we realise how hurt they are. So I feel like those memories are still in my mind and I have also rebelled with them a lot in life. So because I have over time learned to empathize with them, it became easy to empathize with what Tina as a character would have felt when she would have learned that something wrong had happened with her child. She blames her children, herself, and her friends and still can’t do anything.
When asked if Shibani had any apprehensions before signing the film, the actress said, “No not at all. Honestly, I was sold on the fact that Ekta Kapoor and Rhea Kapoor were making the movie, they are great people to collaborate with, If I look at the kind of subjects that Rhea Kapoor has made films on in the past, they all have been commercial movies, but they prioritize women telling women stories. So, As somebody who has also hasn’t ticked all the boxes that please society. My life is exactly like so many stories of so many lives that this film projects. I am not married, I don’t have children, I am in my thirties, I am independent, We don’t have any representation. You know, we don’t see women like me being glorified and getting their stories being told. So, when I got to know that Rhea Kapoor was making it, I was very sure that she would do justice to the story of women. But after reading the story, I felt like the stories of all the women shown in the film are my story. So I had no regrets when I got this movie, It was my creative orgasm.”
Helmed by Karan Boolani, Thank You For Coming tells the story of a woman in her 30s who has never experienced an orgasm, conflates a search for sexual pleasure along with the search for a ‘prince charming’ only to realize in the end that she is self-sufficient. Produced by Rhea Kapoor and Ekta Kapoor, the film also stars Bhumi Pednekar, Dolly Singh, Shehnaaz Gill, Anil Kapoor, Kusha Kapila, and Karan Kundra apart from Shibani Bedi along with others in key roles. The film hit the theatres on October 7 and opened to a positive response from the audience.
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