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British Indian actress Feryna Wazheir, who has a “small but interesting role” in Raja Krishna Menon’s upcoming movie Airlift, starring Akshay Kumar and Nimrat Kaur in lead roles, says that Akshay Kumar “is a lot of fun” to work with.
The story of the film, which is slated to release this month, is a Gulf War drama based on the biggest evacuation of Indians settled in Kuwait during the Iraq-Kuwait war of 1990. Over 170,000 Indians were stuck there due to the invasion for months before they were evacuated by what is known as India’s most heroic rescue mission of Indians outside India.
Akshay Kumar acts as a happily-married man called Ranjit Katyal in the film with Nimrat Kaur playing Amrita Katyal who is his wife.
In the film Katyal has a chance to escape the warzone, but decides not to before first relocating the workers under him to a safer place. “Although it is a Bollywood movie, it is a little more content-driven, and that way is very different from average commercial Bollywood movies,” Feryna said in an interview with News India Times during a visit to New York from London where she lives, last week.
Feryna, cast as Tasneem in the film, said she plays the role of a young Muslim woman from a very wealthy background who ends up in a refugee camp with her six-month-old baby and her maid.
“In the movie Tasneem finds it very hard to adjust going from riches to rags which is the reality of a refugee camp. Everyone had to literally pack their bags overnight and go to these camps. They did not know what was going to happen in camps where people cannot take showers for days, do not have food to eat. Tasneem is one of the three or four characters,” Feryna said.
Feryna, who had been part of two Bollywood films: Ketan Mehta’s Rang Rasiya and Raj Kanwar’s Sadiyaan, and acted on stage, besides appearing in lead roles in music videos by A.R. Rahman, said she got a little intimidated by the presence of Akashay Kumar when she first walked into the set of Airlift. “But I discovered he is a lot of fun (to work with) than I thought he was. He would fool around the set teasing people, cracking jokes from behind all the time,” Feryna said.
“You know, we do not use glycerin in the west to bring tears in your eyes, and in the film I had to cry a lot as my character is a lot stressed out, and then I figured out if you have to cry, you have to cry, and there was Akshay Kumar cracking jokes all the time,” she said in a light vein, alluding to Kumar’s joking about her efforts to cry without glycerin.
But she acknowledged that Kumar is very much focused when he is acting, or his costars are working. It’s a great ability to be able to crack jokes and yet remain focused at the same time,” Feryna, who was born to Kashmiri parents in Scotland and had her education there, said.
Feryna, who had earlier worked, albeit in small roles, with Rekha and Rishi Kapoor in Sadiyan Hema Malini in earlier films, said although she loved at one time being a stage actor, she has increasingly fallen in love with acting in movies. “Movies have much greater reach in terms of viewership, and although unlike in stage acting, you don’t get instant appreciation and recognition, it has a charm and attraction of its own. I think people will enjoy this film (Airlift) based on real life stories,” she said.
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