'I was struggling to not get typecast after Taare Zameen Par', says Tisca Chopra

Actress Tisca Chopra recently turned host for her chat show Tisca’s Table. She gets candid with The Free Press Journal about getting mansplained, age-appropriate roles for women in showbiz, social media trolling, and more.

Tisca rose to fame with the Aamir Khan directorial Taare Zameen Par in 2007, where she played the role of Darsheel Safary’s mother. However, she says that after the movie came out, she was struggling to not get typecast. “I thought after such a big success with such an iconic film, I should be able to walk into projects easily. What I didn’t envisage was that stereotyping is another battle that I would now have to fight. For a year and a half, I didn’t do anything till I decided to do Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, and that kind of role reinvented the idea of what people thought I could do,” she says.

Tisca states that now is a better time to be a woman than a man when it comes to acting. “Men are still caught in stereotypical roles. They are not evolving. Perhaps an Ayushmann Khurrana or a Raj Kummar Rao are bending stereotypes. But our mainstream heroes are stuck playing heroes. Whereas women are playing real people, tactile, breathing flesh and blood characters. The roles are just unbelievable. Look at Badhaai Ho and Neena Gupta and the kind of work she is doing or look at the type of work that Taapsee Pannu is doing,” Tisca gushes.

The actress who has worked in shows such as Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii, 24, and Hostages recalls the time she was mansplained by a director. “When you start out in any business, people feel the need to explain things to you which they assume you don’t know any better. I particularly remember one director; he was like, ‘Just copy what I do’. He basically reduced the level of a trained actor to that of a being monkey. I don’t see him working actively right now, but at that time, I was young, and it was hard to deal with that sort of condescension,” she shares.

Tisca, who is the embodiment of an inspirational woman, considers herself as someone who empowers people. “I am very definite about what I want, and people who are vague and unclear might get intimidated,” she avers.

Tisca is currently working on a feature film that will see her don the director’s hat. Sharing an update of its development, she states, “It’s a cool script and something that I had written with my co-writers a few months before the pandemic, and then we were almost ready to start work on it. Luckily, I have wonderful producers who I have worked with previously. It’s going very well so far, and fingers crossed we should have a good film at our hands,” she states.

Last year, Tisca was called out for sharing the wrong image of weightlifter Mirabai Chanu, who bagged a silver at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, while congratulating her. “I didn’t research enough and quickly put up a wrong picture. I got trolled, saying that I don’t know the difference between the North East of India and Korea, etc. I said I was sorry, that was a genuine mistake, and I didn’t look through the images. It was my fault, and the trolling stopped the next day. You know, if you make a mistake which you will, well, because you are human, you need to own up to that rather than try and cover it up by being over smart. I always say, ‘I am not as smart as I thought I was. I made a mistake. Sorry.’ And I think people appreciate that kind of honesty and candour,” she explains.

Tisca still feels social media offers a lot for creators. “Social media is your way of micro-creating content for your audience. For them to get to know you better in a way that you would like them to know you. How much you want to tell them is your own prerogative. You can hear them directly. It’s firsthand. It’s fantastic that actors are on social media because otherwise, that gap between the audience and their stars is something which is unbridgeable,” she signs off.

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