The role shifter

There would not be any role that she has not played in the past few years. Be it as a mother, friend, sister, lover, single woman, wife or professional,  Lena has done it all with élan. Her recent performance as Prihviraj’s mother in Ennu Ninte Moideen was appreciated widely. Fresh from a role in the Akshay Kumar starrer Airlift, her upcoming films are Karimkunnam Sixes in which she plays the IG of Police, Boban Samuel’s Shahajanum Parikuttiyum and Jude Antony’s film Oru Muttashi Katha. In the last one, she will be attempting humour.

She has never been typecast in any particular slot. Is the reason her careful selection or is it the change in the attitude of the industry?

Lena answers that it is more of the latter though the former also applies. “Earlier character actors were slotted into pegs but now that has changed! In the last 6-7 years the industry has woken up to the fact that it is not only the hero and heroine who matter in a film; instead the kind of stories and making we have is such that all the characters have equal prominence. Character artistes are not just props for the leading man and woman but have an important role to play in the film. Now all the actors get their share of screen space and get to prove their calibre,” she says.

She continues, “Once you do well in a particular role, all the other roles that come your way a couple of months after that will be in the same mould. It takes a lot of guts from my side to keep resisting those roles because you have to wait indefinitely for the next good role to come your way.” She has a point —- filmdom being unpredictable and audience memory being short, it is easier to take up all roles that come your way and make one’s presence felt. Lena states, “Rejecting roles that you feel are repetitive is a gamble. Basically I am afraid of monotony—  it will kill my joy of acting because the whole challenge is in playing varied roles. If I keep playing the same roles then I will get fed up. I have got over that stereotype stage now.”

Lena runs a slimming clinic in Thrissur and Kozhikode and she is looking to bring it to Kochi. She jokes, “I don’t have to do much at the slimming clinic other than going there and slimming myself. I have left it in capable hands.” Though Lena is hard-pressed for time, she has bought a guitar which she carts to the sets in the remote hope of finding some time to practice.