Bhumi Pednekar embodies the fact that talent and hard work can make one a true, big success story. Bhumi stands out for her confidence and sheer range as an actor who has delivered outstanding performances in her first three films. A perfectionist actor, Bhumi’s next film is Abhishek Chaubey’s Son Chiriya and Bhumi reveals her hectic preparations that will definitely wow you!
“For Son Chiriya, yes I’ve been we have been called a perfectionist but I think everybody I was working with on the film was equally perfection crazy starting with my director Abhishek Chaubey – he in my very first meeting had told me that Bhumi the only way you will survive the film and the shoot is that you have to mentallyand physically become so strong that you can survive the terrain and everything that is happening in the film. And he just didn’t mean emotionally but also physically because there is a lot of action, there is a lot of running around – for that he trained us really well – starting from the language that we are speaking which is Bundelkhandi,” Bhumi reveals.
“The physicality of my character concerned Chaubey the most! He really went to the details of it and he literally told me that the women of Chambal are carb eating women. They are muscular but they are lean and they are fit because the amount of work they do through the day – they walk kilometres, go get water, they have to pick up 8-10 litres of water on their head with a child in their arm and walk back. Every time they want to go to the bathroom they have to walk. Through the day they are working at home or in the fields. They don’t really have any rest and I planned my workout around what he told me,” she adds.
Bhumi’s work out regime is the highlight of her prep for Son Chiriya. “So, my trainer Neelam (pilates instructor) and I, we came out with a regime where everything was around the kind of activities my character would do through the day. It was like a month and a half before we started shooting. So, I would walk around with 5-6 litres of water on my head in Aaram Nagar for kilometres and kilometres without any shoes because we were trying to also get rough and tough. But then your body gets used to it. I remember I would carry 10-15 kgs of a wheat sack on my back and again walk and run through Aaram Nagar because there is a lot of running in the film. I would grind like a kg of wheat/aata every day and it looks very easy but it is so tough and very difficult. We included a few things that helped me get the physique and even my diet from a person who has gone off carbs and dairy,” she says.
Son Chiriya stars an ensemble cast including Sushant Singh Rajput, Ashutosh Rana, Ranvir Shorey, Manoj Bajpayee among others. It is slated to release on March 1, 2019.
