Eighteen-year-old Jiah Khan’s dream has come true. “It was my childhood dream to become a Bollywood actor and I only wanted to work with Ramuji (Ram Gopal Varma). I have watched all his films and loved them,” she says.
Add to that, she gets to play the romantic lead opposite Amitabh Bachchan in ‘Nishabd’! “Isn’t that unbelievable?” she squeals, “I was very nervous when I first started working with him. But he is such an incredibly sexy man. He helped me learn acting and also made me extremely comfortable. Not once did I feel I was working with a super-duper star.”
Her role in ‘Nishabd’ is about a teenager falling in love with a much older man. Jiah says that’s the most normal thing to happen to a young girl. “Every young girl experiences a crush on a teacher or any older person. It was easy for me to play this character as it suited me perfectly.”
After having a blast shooting the film, the young star says she hates being back in London. “Can you imagine, the film was wrapped up in 20-odd days? I wanted it to go on forever.”
For someone born and brought up in London, was she comfortable delivering Hindi dialogues? “Oh, that was not a problem at all. My mother Rabia is from Lucknow and she was an actor too. And since I always knew that I would be a Bollywood actress some day, I worked on my Hindi,” she reveals.
In fact, her meeting with RGV was also orchestrated by her mother. “She mentioned my desire to work with him to someone who knows him and that person introduced us to Ramuji,” she recounts.
Jiah likes to describe herself as a “rebel without a cause”. So it makes sense that she’s making her debut with the most unconventional subject in Bollywood!
s_shubha@dnaindia.net
