Interview: Jacqueline Fernandez
By: Arora Rai
Jacqueline Fernandez is definitely used to being an alien-like woman in a foreign land, what with the former Miss Sri Lanka parting ways from the eponymous island nation on the northern fringes of the Indian Ocean and finding herself trying to make it as a Bollywood actress in her adopted homeland of India.
While the former beauty queen may not have an Indian-sounding name and allegedly speaks such poor Hindi that her lines in her debut role last year required post-production dubbing, her apparent shortcomings somehow turned out to work in her favor.
In playing the lead female role in Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai, Fernandez was actually stunned that her non-mastery of Hindi would be a good thing. Then again, in playing an alien from Venus posing as a woman on Earth, the beauty queen’s disadvantage suddenly became a huge advantage.
“I am new to Hindi, and this is why I was relieved when someone else dubbed for me in my debut in Aladin. I was under the impression that same would be repeated in Jaane Kahan,” the actress told reporters while promoting Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai earlier this week. “So I shot my scenes without worrying much about pronunciation and spacing.”
When the film’s director, Milap Zaveri, informed Fernandez whose regular voice would be featured throughout Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai in its entirety, the beauty queen-turned-actress was not sure how to react, mostly because she thought her non-mastery of Hindi would hamper the movie.
“Being shocked would be an understatement. I pleaded Milap to get someone else on board in the dubbing studio,” she frankly told the press. “This is just my second film, and I felt I would ruin it if audiences heard me speaking Hindi in my own sweet accent. But he formalized it all, blocked my date diary, and literally dragged me into the dubbing room.”
It took her a little while to wrap her head around the situation, and Fernandez was not at all sure she would be able to do the film justice, what with her Sri Lankan background and her language barrier.
”I have no qualms in admitting that Hindi is not something that comes naturally to me,” she confessed to the press. “I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to go back to the shoot and re-do everything that I had done, as far as mouthing dialogues was concerned.”
Still, Fernandez did what any professional in her situation would do – she took a step back, focused, concentrated, and worked to make things work out as properly as possible.
“I sat down, took a deep breath, and took some time off to pull up my socks,” she sighed to reporters. “Thankfully, due to a wonderful crew and especially my co-star and friend Sonal Sehgal, I started feeling much better after every scene. It all went well eventually, but honestly, if I look back at the shoot of Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai, it was the dubbing which was the most challenging piece of work.”
As challenging as her dubbing sequences may have been, the learning experience she endured on just her second film will no doubt be beneficial to Fernandez’s prospects of building, developing and strengthening a top-notch resume in Bollywood.
Starring Riteish Deshmukh, Ruslaan Mumtaz, Sonal Sehgal and Vishal Malhotra, Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai is now playing worldwide and features several guest appearances by some of Bollywood’s biggest names, including Akshay Kumar, Priyanka Chopra, Karan Johar, Farah Khan, Sajid Khan, Boman Irani and Amrita Rao.
Jaane Kahan Se Aayi Hai is co-produced by Nikhal Advani and Mukesh Talreja, and is presented by Warner Bros.
