Why Can't People Talk About Sex?

You’d never have guessed it, but this girl is the kind of belly-laughing, deliciously audacious energy that rarely rears its head in Bollywood’s politically correct quarters. When you hybridise a dainty demeanour with opinions daring enough to send Indian society into a spiral, you get Ileana D’Cruz...

- Saumyaa Vohra

Google Ileana D’Cruz, and the pictures that fill your screen are decidedly that of a ‘simple’ girl, the kind you’d cast as the quintessential ‘girl next door’. It’s a typecasting Ileana grudgingly acknowledges.

“It’s what people usually take me to be. They think I’m so ‘sweet’. It’s awful because I’m not like that; at least, I don’t think I am. I’m a bad*ss! I don’t go through life with a smile on my face, and you do not want to get on my nasty side!” she says, smiling sweetly.

But a conversation with her that comfortably meanders well beyond cinematic parameters proves that initial inference dead wrong. Far more brazen and reformist than most tender-footed Bollywood actors would be willing to admit being, Ileana is less a star, and more a realas-f*ck woman with a world view that our country, and particularly our society, desperately needs.

It all begins with an unfeigned admission—of starting out in film with a total lack of passion. “I kind of felt like I never really fit in with any real Bollywood stereotype. And when I was starting out [in Southern cinema], I wasn’t really into it. Actually, for the first two years, I hated acting. We’re in an industry where you need to look like a model but act like an actor—a trait fairly exclusive to our industry, I think. I’ve never looked like a model, so I used to look at the industry itself with derision (because I was young and naïve). But I went into it because I was 18, and they were giving me a lot of money. That, to me, was awesome! I was like, ‘Hey, I didn’t know what I was doing with my life anyway, so I guess I’m an actor now!’ At that point, the money was more than reason enough!” When she talks about her career now, the passion has obviously kicked in with