Girija Oak Godbole interview: ‘If you have to get your due, you get it’

She has been a film and theatre actor for years, but a few of her recent projects have suddenly given Girija Oak Godbole’s career a boost – her role as the disgruntled wife in The Perfect Family, the simple housewife who brings innocence to the all-male ensemble in the crime film Inspector Zende, the tragic heroine of Dostoevsky’s White Nights in the musical stage adaptation, Chandni Raatein.

Oak Godbole will be seen next in the Netflix series Hello Bacchon on March 6. She wears her show-stopping beauty lightly, has no need for an entourage, and gives equal importance to her personal life as to her work. Excerpts from an interview.

You have been an actor for a while, but some viewers have only just discovered you after The Perfect Family.

It actually happened because of this one clip that went viral as part of a podcast that I was doing with Lallantop. It was one of those bizarre viral moments where I was called the Blue Sari Girl. Suddenly, everybody is like, “Who is she? who is she?”

It’s fascinating how this works, and what people might like. Something blows up and suddenly everybody is talking about you and discovering things that you have done and then those are being shared and reshared. There is no design to this, so it’s surprising and overwhelming and strange.

I felt so good, and validated, because that picture that went viral has a little bit of my stomach showing and I am not size zero at all. But people were sharing it and saying very nice things about it.

Your father, Girish Oak, is a well-known actor. Did you grow up with showbiz around you?

I watched a lot of my father’s plays because he primarily did theatre, so I grew up backstage. My mother is a very simple, strict person. She worked in a finance company for most of my childhood.

Marathi cinema is not as glamorous as Bollywood, and theatre is even less glam. Maharashtrians had a very different culture back then – the idea of a star aura didn’t exist. I remember my father's co-actors would buy groceries on their way back home from shows.

Most Marathi theatre actors had permanent jobs. And the fact that they were actors was why they had these government jobs, with BEST, banks or the municipal corporation. A lot of actors used to do theatre part time and they were allowed a bit of extra leave to do shows or tour outside.

It wasn’t assumed that I would take up acting. I was good at studies, so people thought I’d pursue academics. I studied microbiology and biotechnology. But I started working halfway through college, and the studying part got left behind.

When did you start taking acting seriously?

After I finished my graduation. By then I started getting so much work that post-grad was almost impossible for me.

I did Taare Zameen Par [2007] in my second year. Before that, I had finished doing two or three Marathi films already. I was also doing Gujarati theatre while in college, lots of tours and shows outside.

I don’t remember a very clear point at which I felt, okay, now this [acting] begins and this [studies] has ended. For a very long time I kept pursuing the idea that I might want to do my masters and then genetics. But it started becoming apparent that acting was more or less looking like a career.

What was the game plan? Because theatre is not a very stable career.

Ever since I have been working, theatre has always been looked at as some sort of a training space or a stepping stone, with screen work as the final destination. The only difference between Marathi and Gujarati theatre is the number of shows and the volume of theatre that happens.

So, it is sustainable doing a play in Gujarati, because you do 34 shows in a month sometimes. There were two plays that that did a lot of shows. One was Kamaal Patel versus Dhamaal Patel, the other was Bapu Na Rajma Leela Laher. And I also did Dear Father (with Paresh Rawal) that ran for 10 years.

I remember, Radhika Apte and I were shooting for Shor In The City. After that she went to Laban [Conservatoire in London]. I thought that was so amazing that she go off to study for a few years. I never found the space, but I would have loved to go somewhere, maybe take up a short course.

Radhika has navigated her career well. You did a lot of work but didn’t focus on, say, taking cinema seriously.

I am somebody who wants to do a lot of different things, who wants to try different languages, who wants to dabble with everything. I don’t understand this idea of charting a trajectory. What if it doesn’t go that way?

Actors come at the fag end of a process. You don’t have the liberty to wait for somebody to think up a story, to think you are okay for it and then approach you. Everything needs to fall in place for you to be able to actually land up in the project.

I took up work the way I liked and I sincerely believe in. I am not saying this to sound cool or care-a-damn, but I really do feel work is one part of my life.

I enjoy having a family. I got married at the age of 23, I had Kabir at 25. I had a lovely time raising him. When he was a little baby, I was doing shows with Pareshbhai [Rawal]. I used to feed Kabir in the interval and do the second half.

I had a lot of fun in this entire journey. If you have to get your due, you get it. There are so many examples where we feel, what great talent wasted. Whatever you get, it’s up to you to make sure that you do that to your best capacity.

You are also married into showbiz, through your husband Suhrud and father-in-law Shrirang Godbole. By today’s jargon, you are a nepo kid.

I am, I am. But the stakes are so low in Marathi that nepotism really doesn’t do much.

The Marathi film industry is like Bollywood, but smaller. Marathi has a different way of working, it’s still not very corporatised. It has started to change, but earlier there were verbal contracts. The core of the Marathi industry is still one-on-one relationships.

When people approach you for a role, what are they looking for?

In theatre I’m doing a lot of work in the musical space right now. I am doing Chandni Raatein, Gauhar, Thakishi Samvaad, so clearly the fact that I sing must be a plus. I come from a family of musicians and I still learn Dhrupad.

Others, I don't really know. Even my age… Some people think I am a young person, some people offer me 50-year-old person roles. Some people want to pair me opposite much older actors.

Which I kind of like too, because if I am this sort of shapeless, colourless, amorphous sort of a personality, then I may be able to do so many different roles in different age groups and social or cultural backgrounds. Marathi actors do tend to get parts of Hindi-speaking Maharashtrian people. Not that I am against it, but sometimes it's a little annoying because I feel like we can move ahead of that.

In fact, in The Perfect Family, you play a north Indian character.

I knew the director, Sachin Pathak, but he told me later that he never thought of me. I happened to be at [casting director] Mukesh Chhabra’s office, and one of the team members asked me read out a scene. I did the take – the scene in which she is angrily pulling down streamers – and I was cast in The Perfect Family.

When I met Sachin on the set, he said to me, I could never imagine you as an angry person who has a problem with rage and with controlling it.

What role do you think you fit into best?

Apart from my role and how consequential my part is, or what value I am adding as a character to the whole, I also think I should be part of good stories and good scripts. I am looking for a script that can stand on its own. A script needs to read like complete work, and then you can enhance it. But a lot of scripts that I read don't actually have strong two feet to stand on.

It also matters to me whom I am working with because at the end of the day, it’ not just a job. I want to have fun, be comfortable and be in a good environment.

The fun thing about theatre is that you don’t have to think about these aspects. You can focus on whether you like the written material or not.

Theatre actors have starred in many prominent streaming shows in recent times.

OTT [streaming] began with the idea that it is going to be an actor-driven platform. And it has now slowly gotten back to being star-driven.

The first time a stage actor does a major show and become a star – like Pratik Gandhi – what happens then is that you aren’t looking for another Pratik. What you’re doing is repeating Pratik everywhere.

Nobody is taking a chance. I am all for theatre actors getting their due. But once they do great work, nobody is backing another new actor.

The OTT scene is not very promising right now. People have stopped making shows on their own without the presence of a platform. There is a lot of meddling, people who aren’t creative people themselves taking creative decisions. Everything is driven by research and numbers and it's just not easy.

Which of your roles defines you best?

I would say the play Don Special. That play is very close to my heart for various reasons. One being it was the most difficult character (a PR fixer) for me to look at kindly. She was such a herd mentality, spineless, meek character. She was one of those non-heroic people you don’t even empathise with, just feel pity. And I took so long to make peace with her.

The Perfect Family is very close to my heart. Just reading Neeti broke my heart. She’s so trapped, she’s a circumstantial victim of things. And yet there is this desperate sort of fight to keep her head up and keep looking like she is worth more. This extreme pathos of that character really got to me.

It was a lot of tight ropewalking, I didn’t want her to slip into this bechari [helpless] mode. And I didn’t want her to become a villainous, conniving, plotting, manipulating character. She was just stuck. And that was very interesting to play.

What would you consider your breakthrough project? Have you reached that stage?

I hope I never reach it. I hope I keep finding it for the rest of my life because after that I wouldn’t know what else to do.