Bollywood star Deepika Padukone on her emotional journey filming acid attack survivor story Chhapaak
- Padukone, one of Bollywood’s highest paid stars, donned prosthetics to play Laxmi Agarwal, who survived an acid attack as a teenager
- She talks about the emotions of playing the recovery scenes, and how the film strives for honesty
It was a shocking crime: after a teenage girl resisted a man’s advances, acid was thrown onto her face, disfiguring her.
How Laxmi Agarwal responded to that 2005 attack inspired Bollywood superstar Deepika Padukone and director Meghna Gulzar to make the movie Chhapaak (meaning “splash”), which opens in North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East on January 10.
“What I needed to tell in this story was her triumph,” says Padukone. “I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with Laxmi, and it was her spirit, her determination, her dedication to what she does that impressed me. That and her sense of humour – she’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”
The actress agreed to appear in Gulzar’s project before she even finished reading the script. Padukone admits that playing Malti, the movie’s version of Agarwal, was the biggest challenge of her career.
“I thought about how we’re going to achieve this look, who we would get to do the prosthetics, how much trauma do we want to show, what kind of surgeries do we want to show, what is the kind of recovery that we wanted to show – those were the sort of questions running through my mind,” she explains.