Rani Mukerji Talks About What Continues To Make Her Tick On Screen

Actor Rani Mukerji has connected with the audience for more than two decades by channeling her own sensitivity into the characters she plays.

- Kunal Purandare

Rani Mukerji is the centre of attention in the banquet hall of a five-star Mumbai hotel, where she is meeting the media. Fresh from the success of her latest release, Hichki, she is perched cross-legged on a chair, wearing her trademark smile that has won over moviegoers for more than two decades. The grin only gets wider as she speaks about Hichki, which released this March, and raked in `45 crore in a month. “It’s a validation for an actor when a film succeeds, and the audience connects with it,” she says. “Hichki is a movie that people talk about in terms of being an inspirational one, something that will stay in their hearts for a long time. That has made its success even sweeter.”

Hichki is a tale of triumph of the underdog: Naina Mathur, a teacher with Tourette syndrome—a neuropsychiatric disorder characterised by the person emitting multiple peculiar sounds, often in the middle of completing a sentence—who brings about a positive change in the lives of a handful of underprivileged children. Made on a budget of `12 crore, it put 40-year-old Mukerji on the silver screen after a four-year hiatus, and garnered widespread praise from critics and audiences for her sensitive portrayal of Mathur.

Acclaim is not alien to Mukerji. She has got that in abundance from the time she brought freshness to the screen with films such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and Ghulam (1998) early in her career, to the instances when she pulled offcomplex roles such as in Saathiya (2002) and Black (2005). Despite that, the seasoned actor got the jitters when she went on the sets for the first time since her last outing on celluloid, Mardaani (2014).