They don’t make ‘em like her. Not anymore. When it comes to making unconventional choices, the closest parallel I can find to Taapsee Pannu is the yesteryears’ actress Tanuja, who chose not what would make her a star but roles that opened up new ways for a female hero to express herself. Here’s looking at Taapsee’s top 10.
- Baby (2014): She had only a cameo in this espionage drama. But she broke the glass ceiling and a lot else when she played the warrior queen Shabana Khan, ready to take on the most hardened criminals on their own territory. Her hand-to-hand with actor Sushant Singh in a hotel room was to die for.
- Pink (2016): Two years after Baby, producer Shoojit Sircar and director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury cast Taapsee as a casualty of sexual assault who won’t play the victim, won’t stop wearing short dresses, won’t stop drinking if she wishes—just to prove only bad girls get sexually violated. Taapsee was like a coiled-up livewire ready to erupt any time. Any place. Even the courtroom. Contempt not just of court but all social conventions.
- Naam Shabana (2017): As an Indian intelligence agent, the myopic script didn’t allow her character to go far enough. Taapsee’s Shabana Khan was cowed down constantly, first by Manoj Bajpai barking orders on the phone and then by Akshay Kumar who insisted on holding her hand and walking her through the action scenes when all Shabana wanted to do was kick some ass. Solo. Given the limitations, Taapsee managed to wrap her head around her character’s flaws and make them seem like human traits that we need to conquer to achieve a level of success beyond the prescribed.
- Badlaa (2018): Playing the anti-heroine to the hilt, a character so morally twisted she makes every Bad Girl seen in Hindi cinema seem like a kindergarten prankster, Taapsee blew our brains out with her character’s devious mind. To put it in a nutshell, playing an unfaithful wife, she gave body to a mind that was dangerous and self-destructive. A truly liberating performance—and the film made truckloads of money to boot. Yes!
- Manmarziyan (2018): Playing a girl who loves having sex in itself—such an uncommon thing to do. How did Taapsee agree? Lok kya kahenge? Mummy kya kahegi? And how did she get away with hitting the sack without making the moralists train their guns on her?
- Mulk (2018): This time, it wasn’t about how much space her character occupied in the script. It was about being part of a project that gave her the freedom to speak about the lack of freedom denied to certain sections of our society. Taapsee played the Hindu daughter-in-law of a Muslim, fighting to restore the family’s dignity in court.
- Game Over (2019): Confined to a wheelchair, no glamorous trappings, no boyfriend tucked away in some corner, playing a hyper-tense, chronically suicidal woman suffering from tattoo terror, Taapsee just knocks the ball out of the park.
- Thappad (2020): Taapsee Pannu brought to her hurt wife’s role a heroic dignity and a distant poignancy that distil themselves in a performance of screaming silences. I dare any other contemporary actress to equal the sheer persuasive power of Taapsee’s performance.
- Haseen Dilruba (2021): Haseen Dilruba entails an acquired taste to be enjoyed. Taapsee’s character Rani’s hormonal swings and crimes are not easy to accept. She is fatal and flawed. But damn sexy. Taapsee delivers yet another titillating tongue-in-cheek performance, rendering Rani a libertine hard to slot. The plot is fraught with dangerous curves—as dangerous as Taapsee Pannu’s swinging walk as she defiantly steps out of her small-town housewife’s orbit to fancy-cut her father-in-law (Daya Shankar Pandey)’s hair, show the middle finger to her bullying mother-in-law (Yamini Das), and bed with her husband’s beefy cousin (Harshvardhan Rane).
- Khel Khel Mein (2024): Taapsee Pannu excels as a clueless Punjabi housewife trying hard to pretend that her husband is okay, trying harder to make a baby with him. This is serio-comic territory, and Taapsee has loads of fun with it. As she always does with her characters, no matter if the mood is grim or grin.
Also Read: 16 Years On, ‘Love Aaj Kal’ Still Haunts With Its Questions
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