I am the undiscovered Meg Ryan of India: Kalki Koechlin

"It's so nice to be in an old-fashioned, normal interview,” sighs actor Kalki Koechlin as she leads me to a quiet corner, away from the humdrum of the promotional activity for her next release Ribbon. "It's such a relief," she repeats before we sit down for the interview. She was recording promotional videos for the partner/associates of the movie—delivering scripted, promotional lines that she wasn't so gung-ho about—often making her displeasure clear to the film's team. “Being a clown, keep talking, keep talking....it's so depressing,” she animatedly tells me.

The critical or commercial failure of her last week’s release, Jia Aur Jia, doesn’t seem to have unnerved her. The team working on the promotions is a little worried that they have upset her by forcing her to do promotional videos, but she is calm. Probably, she understands the drill before a film’s release very well now. She rather gives a tight hug to one of the girls who looked really petrified.

The first time I sat with Kalki for a long chat was way back in 2009—she was still high on the success of Dev D and was performing the play, The Skeleton Woman (which she had written and acted in). She was chirpy, lively and vocal, as she is known to be, yet also much aware of the feelings of everyone working on the play. She doesn’t seem to have changed over all these years. A lot has happened in her life and career since then, but she is happy with how it has turned out. “It's been good. I can't complain,” she says. For the time being, since she is having two back-to-back releases, she feels like Akshay Kumar. She laughs as she says that. Her much-talked about sense of humour is on full display.

The biggest achievement, she says, in all these years, for her has been to have gotten to try so many different things. “I am still trying. So many different platforms—from theatre to spoken word to films to commercials and indie,” she says.

It’s exhilarating to know that you can do so many things, but at the same time exhausting too. “I am just a restless kind of a person and I need to express myself, so it’s good for me to have all these medium to do it. I find it therapeutic,” she says as she talks about the new spoken-word piece she composed for the recently concluded Spoken Fest in Mumbai that was performed in front of almost 2,000 people. “I was damn nervous; not enough rehearsal and all that. But once you are on-stage and are connecting with your audience, there’s this magic that happens. I live for that, trying to connect with other human beings on a larger scale,” she says.

Stage performances, especially theatre, have helped her stay in touch with reality. “You know, (being a part of the theatre community) we travel economy, we carry our own stuff, do our own make-up. We’re in touch with each-other. There’s not a vanity van experience where you’re a little cut-off from the world. That’s really important,” she says, also emphasising on how theatre is the best way to practice and stay in touch with your craft.

However, she would remain away from directing plays though. Earlier, she has written Skeleton Woman, and directed, wrote and produced The Living Room. But she says it was a huge job. “It was exhausting. I couldn’t do anything else. And I don’t think I enjoyed it. I found it very stressful. I don’t think I am made for direction. I do like writing and performing, so I think I will be doing a lot more collaborative work. I don’t know about actually becoming a director full time, but you never know. Right now, I am so excited about acting. I want to be acting till I am ninety,” she says.

In Ribbon that releases this Friday, Kalki plays Sahana, a young woman married to Karan (played by Sumeet Vyas). The film is about the young, Mumbai-based couple, who struggle with Sahana’s pregnancy and things that change for them.

When Rakhi Shandilya, the director of Ribbon, sent Kalki a mail about the film she was travelling, doing Macbeth shows in America. “I read the script in a bus and liked it so much that I immediately started Googling the subject—maternity leave, if you can have sex when you are eight months pregnant—all the things mentioned in it. I discovered that everything that she has written is authentic and I liked that a lot,” says Kalki about the initial stage of saying yes to the movie.

Later, on watching Shandilya’s documentary My Baby Not Mine on surrogacy in Gujarat, Kalki realised how skilled she is in direction. “She knew how not to be intrusive with her camera, capturing things almost like a fly-on-the-wall. I thought that was great.”

As far as playing a mother is concerned, Kalki was nothing but glad to have done that. “I have been playing underage characters all my life—17, 18-year-old characters. Finally, I am playing a character my own age. I think it’s a great challenge. I had to research motherhood. Also, it’s a great preparation for my future. I am so pro on changing nappies, how to handle a baby and all these things now,” she laughs as she talks about the experiences fondly.

In real life, she says, she thought for the first time of becoming a mother when she had a brother almost nine years ago. Her father remarried and she could witness her brother’s birth and growing up years. “Before that I didn’t really think about having kids; I wasn’t very maternal. But since I saw my brother growing up and he comes back from school now with a project in which he has to save the world, I would be like ‘oh, yes, that is what we have to do.’ It’s like a renewal of innocence in your life,” Kalki says.

As she mentions earlier, she has often been cast in similar roles, but she doesn’t complain. “Everyone is typecast. It is up to you to break that by the choices you make. You are of course limited to what scripts come your way, but within that you still try to make each character unique. It’s you responsibility. The industry can’t be blamed because it will think from the business point of view, of making a hit.”

After so many years, she has started getting roles that are different but still “limited to the urban world.” “I don’t get to play a village belle,” she says with a little disappointment making me curious if she wants to do that. “I would love to. But physically, how will it be possible,” she says matter-of-factly. “Unless I am a Kashmiri, for which too I will have to learn the language. But I am getting challenges. I am playing a Nepali character (in a film by Nicholas Kharkongor). It’s a huge challenge but it’s great that I am getting offers like these,” she says, however, adding that one thing that she always cribs about is that how she is the “undiscovered Meg Ryan of India.” “Nobody has figured out that I would be such a goofy, fun, rom-com queen. I am waiting for that to fall on my lap,” laughs the actor.

For the time being, her plate is full. Besides the regular theatre shows that she is a part of, she is also starring in Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti’s show, Made In Heaven for Amazon Video, Rajat Kapoor’s next directorial venture and another film titled Scholarship along with Konkona Sen Sharma.