I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching Yami Gautam as an actor, from her television show, Yeh Pyaar Na Hoga Kam itself. Then, she was so good in effortlessly portraying such complex emotions in her debut film like Vicky Donor. But now she’s completely given us a new avatar with A Thursday and the film is getting immense appreciation.
Ask Yami if this transformation from film-to-film and changing the goody-two-shoes image was conscious and she says,
“It took 10 years for it, I’d say. But if you go the right way and solely want to make a mark because of your work, it takes time. There are many ups and downs. You feel like, I started with a film like Vicky Donor which had so much and was so performance-oriented. Yet, many people felt that ‘oh she’s just a beautiful face.’ But I know my passion my work is much stronger than anyone’s perception. So, it takes time to change that. You have to constantly prove yourself with every film. Sometimes, you don’t even have that many opportunities and you have to choose from what you get. People can judge and say, ‘why did she take that film’ but you never know, that could have been the best option. With time, I started searching for scripts and it takes one director’s faith in you that you can pull off a certain character – like in Uri or Bala. Things changed there for me. Then now with A Thursday, everything has changed for me, I’m getting some great feedback and that’s overwhelming.”
It’s definitely taken time but I’m so happy things are going this way now for Yami because she truly is such a good performer. The actress also believes some roles require a lot of prep and her character in A Thursday was one of them.
Yami adds,
“I realized that my prep for this character would be very different. I knew the approach would be different for this and it can’t be spontaneous. The spontaneity would also come when you’ve worked on the character. For me, it was very important to go to the depth, to see everything again and again, think of it and give shape to the character. More than my words, it’s in my head how I’ve done it. I won’t really be able to put it in words. But, it was a long process.”
Apart from this OTT release, Yami has four very interesting projects lined up which are very different from each other. The actress will be seen in OMG 2 – Oh MY God! 2, with Akshay Kumar and Pankaj Tripathi. She also has Dasvi with Abhishek Bachchan and Lost. There’s another project which she would talk about once the official announcement is made by the producers.