ACTOR Nimrat Kaur, known for her performances in Airlift, Dasvi, Homeland and The Family Man, rose to international fame with The Lunchbox, in which she played Ila, a lonely homemaker in Mumbai who begins an unlikely correspondence with a stranger, played by Irrfan Khan, after her lunch tiffin is mistakenly delivered to him. The film premiered at Cannes and was also shown at 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. Nimrat said she was offered variations of the same character after The Lunchbox, the trapped, unhappy homemaker; however, she turned them down. Nimrat said the offers began arriving after the film's global success. "I fought tooth and nail. That is not a fluke because I tried my level best. Believe me, some 10-15 projects must have come to me, like a trapped housewife, someone who wants to get out of a marriage, someone who's unhappy in it, this, that, the other," she said. Kaur said she deliberately held out. "I actually made sure that, if there was a delay in some projects being visible, it was because I was just holding out. I was like, I'm not going to keep repeating what I've just done, something that is so beautifully just up there. Why would you want to touch a space like that and play the same thing again?" Even today, she said, she guards against it. "There are times when if I even so much as get a whiff that this is going in that space again, or, you know, bored, sad, lonely housewife again, no thanks." Nimrat also rejected the idea that the gap in her filmography was a strategy. “The Lunchbox happened out of plan. That was not in the syllabus," she said, adding that she was "astounded" by the response.

 

After the film premiered at Cannes and was released in some 75 countries, she toured with it for months. "Immediately after that I was cast in Homeland, which took me away for about six to eight months of filming, after which I came back and then I did Airlift, which took another year to film. So the gap you're talking about is actually me filming 'Homeland' and filming 'Airlift'." On preparing for Ila, Nimrat said she was doing theatre in Mumbai at the time and had months with the script. "I put on a bit of weight. Not that I was asked to. I just wanted to do it. I just stopped looking after myself. The vanity part of life I let go of for a few months. I genuinely wanted to experience her isolation and her quietness and the softness and the naivety. She's such a soft, sweet and simple person who just lives in her bubble and eventually just breaks away." She said she drew on women she had seen while growing up in small cities and in her paternal side village. "I had an idea in mind which I wanted to bring to life. I thought about how best to construct her and make her very softly believable, not an aggressive kind of preparation, which also shows sometimes." Nimrat also spoke about preparing for her character, saying, “There was no hair and makeup, I would just tie my hair up. I put some mehndi on my nails to give my hands a little character because I knew there'd be a lot of food and hand shots. I set the kitchen up with the art director as you would your own kitchen, so even blindfolded, you could reach what you needed. We shot in a small apartment in Malad, so it all felt very true to life, and it was just really good.” Nimrat said typecasting has cut both ways in her career. "When I was working in the modelling industry, I was told that I look too western to be cast as an Indian domestic woman. And then The Lunchbox happened and all I kept getting was, they see Indian." She added, "It's amazing how perceptions change. It takes one role.