Bhumi Pednekar: I find solace in the fact that my art is not apolitical

Bhumi Pednekar along with writer-creator Suresh Triveni, open up about making their show ‘Daldal’, how Suresh worked on adapting it from a novel, Bhumi’s reading habits and more

Bhumi Pednekar plays a disturbed cop, Rita Ferreira in Prime Video’s recently released web-series, Daldal. There is a string of unease in her personality; she hides a dark past behind her stoic demeanour. The show’s title reveals a part of her mind, which is as murky as the serial killing case that she takes up. The denseness and three-dimensionality of Rita have a novelistic scope. The show has been inspired by Vish Dhamija’s crime-thriller book, Bhendi Bazaar. Bhumi, who embodies Rita’s heaviness with rigour, says that the seires takes a departure from how cops are portrayed in popular culture.

Bhumi Pednekar in ‘Daldal’ | Photo Credit: Prime Video

“We have always seen the police force being glamorised. Daldal is far from that. It is more twisted and dark. What really attracted me to the show was how complex Rita is. She is a cop, but has every instinct to be on the other side. The writing has humanised her,” says Bhumi.

The actor grew up reading a lot of crime fiction. “When I was a young adult, the craze of Harry Potter books had started. Additionally, I used to also read a lot of rom-coms. There was a phase when I was into the Nancy Drew series. All of those books shaped a lot of my childhood,” says Bhumi. However, she stopped reading fiction in her later years, when she was mostly reading film scripts, watching shows, and consuming content from different means. The actor also recounts how being on the phone impacted her attention span.

“I was so used to snacky content that even reading film scripts became difficult. I had grown so impatient that I would not be able to go through even a thirty-second reel. The doom-scrolling habit scarred me deeply,” she says. However, Bhumi has become more mindful recently as she has returned to reading. “Right now I am in my Erotica era,” she says with a laugh and then explains, “It is good literature.”

That struggle has been similar for Suresh Triveni, who serves as the writer and creator of Daldal. Suresh has brought many books with the aim of reading them one day. “It is important to read more now as our life experiences are depleting, and acquiring newer experiences from books is needed,” he says.