I feel everything to the maximum, says Shefali Shah

Whenever she passes the RBI residential complex in Santa Cruz, Mumbai, she doesn’t fail to point out to whoever is with her in the car: “That’s where I lived for years when I was growing up, on the third floor.” Equally, she can’t forget the bread roll Mrs Sud used to make in the canteen of Arya Vidya Mandir, an upmarket Juhu school which was “way above my parents’ means”. She was a solitary child, “very boring, much disliked,” and often called “LS” (low society) by her snooty classmates.

All of that and much more has made Shefali Shah who she is today. A celebrat­ed actor capable of playing everything from a domestic servant to a bored,

rich wife; wife of a successful produc­er-director Vipul Shah; mother to two young men, 20 and 21, and two gigantic huskies. And she’s never too far away from throwing herself head and heart into whatever character that catches her fancy next.

The latest is Shailaja Desai, a divorce court clerk who discovers she is suffering from Alzheimer’s and wants to return to the small town in Konkan where she spent her childhood. The film is Avinash Arun’s Three of Us, and when it was released in theatres it was crushed under the weight of big films. But as she says, it came like a “dada” (boss) on New Year’s Eve on Netflix and has been receiving just appreciation from audi­ences ever since.

Shot in 2021, it stars Swanand Kirkire as Shah’s husband and Jaideep Ahlawat as the boy she left behind, now a married banker who writes poetry in his spare time. It is tender, nostalgic, quiet, and has been beautifully shot by Arun. “Watching it is like meditating, breathe in, breathe out” she says.

It comes after a year spent wait­ing for good work. A year that has frustrated her, even though it got her a much-vaunted nomination at the International Emmy Awards. “I am convinced now that 2022 was a fluke,” she says, referring to a year where she had five releases, web series to movies, each of them much loved and appreci­ated—Human on Disney+Hotstar, Jalsa on Prime Video, Darlings and Delhi Crime 2 on Netflix, and Dr G in theatres. “I haven’t found a single part that I wanted to play,” she says, adding, “Also I’m not the easiest person to please. I ask too many questions.”

As she should, given the amount of preparation she does for her roles, read­ing the script closely, asking countless questions, shaping the body language, and the tone to adopt, whether it is the childlike awe with which she views her home town after she steps out of the train from Mumbai in Three of Us, or whether it is the way she walks, her spine straight, the minute she steps into Vartika Chaturvedi’s shoes in Delhi Crime Season 1 and 2.

Mozez Singh, who co-directed Human with Vipul Shah, says, “When she gets her script, she studies it, makes copious notes, and is so deeply involved in her character. She comes up with suggestions that take the character to a place you had never imagined. That’s how collaborative she is and when you’re shooting with her, she wants to make sure you reach the destination you have decided to and she won’t stop till she gets there. Her dedication to her craft is 100 per cent, it is immense and immaculate but she is also a big fan of the acting process, as someone who is hungry, wants to learn and is a devotee.”

“I feel everything to the maximum,” admits Shah, 50, adding, “I am one of those who listens to a sad song on repeat just to cry.” Her characters are all an extension of her, she says, saying and doing things she herself could not. “If a character I am playing says divorce is perfectly valid for a couple who can no longer live together, I can get away with it, without being judged.”

She has no time for falsehood or pre­tence. “It takes too much effort to do that, it’s not worth it,” she says with a laugh. It is an open laughter, her big eyes wid­ening, the effervescence bubbling. The same face can turn grim when playing the diabolical Dr Gauri Nath in Human, the medical thriller, or the mischievous Shamshunissa in the twisted Darlings.

Her current lifestyle may be far removed from some of the char­acters she plays (the domestic help in Jalsa or the home cook in Darlings) but she observes and absorbs experiences around her. “I’ve seen such a life first hand. I come from a lower middle-class background. There were years when we didn’t have a roof over our heads and my father had to plead with relatives to allow my mother and I to stay with them,” she says. “My home now is a real home with the same rules that other families have—everyone has to pick up their plates, not waste food. Your family is who you are, your roots are who you are. Everything else is just paraphernalia,” she adds.

Luxury is nice to have, she says, but there is no end to it. There’s always something bigger, better, flashier. Where does one stop?

Somewhere the little girl who was locked up after school while her mother went to work (as a homeopathic doctor) and her father (who was with the Reserve Bank of India) came back from work hasn’t changed. She is still capable of enjoying her solitude, and living with so many fluctuations in her 30-year-long career in TV, movies and now streaming.

She has had so many breakthroughs, and yet it was only in the 2010s that she started getting lead roles. Perhaps the film industry didn’t quite know what to do with her—she was brilliant in a small role in Satya (1998) playing the mercurial Bhiku Mhatre’s fiery wife, Pyaari. Three years later, she played Ria, the victim of sexual abuse in Monsoon Wedding, captivating audiences across the world with her shattered gaze and permanently broken heart.

Even that wasn’t enough to wake up the industry When Vipul Shah cast her in his family drama: Waqt: The Race Against Time (2005), this time as Amitabh Bachchan’s wife, though she was much younger, it looked as if her career was finally over. But the attrac­tion of working with Bachchan was too much, overriding even her husband’s warning. Ironically though, she had mostly played women older than her, even in theatre and on TV.

In Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), she was a revelation as a bored farmhouse wife eating herself to distraction even as her husband obsessed about class and privilege. The short film Juice (2017), where Neeraj Ghaywan cast her as the put-upon housewife that every harried woman serving her husband could identify with, things turned around for her again.

Streaming has given her career a fillip. “Everything I’ve been offered now is in the writing stage, so 2023 was very difficult,” she says. Why? “I have no clue why, though it may have something to do with the industry being in a strange limbo. A lot of series were shot in a rush after Covid-19 and not all of them got renewed,” she says. So she spent the last year waiting rather than working.

Suresh Triveni, who directed her in Jalsa, says: “Shefali Shah is a national treasure. Honestly, we aren’t doing justice to her talent. She is that good. She is like a kid. Her curiosity, her enthusiasm, her approach towards her craft is absolute innocence. In fact, her craft still makes her like a kid growing up. Make any­thing out of it. She will turn into that. The Shefali Shah that we are acknowledging now is just the tip of the iceberg.”

She is still the girl who lived a latch-key existence through her childhood— though she says she snapped like a rubber band when she went to Mithibai College, enjoying her new life, especially theatre. Even now, she is de­lighted by the “tornado of love” for Three of Us, but also disappointed she didn’t win her International Emmy for Best Female Actor for Delhi Crime 2. “I was so upset with myself, I was judging myself. Until Vipul reminded me on the way back from New York that Meryl Streep, the woman I worship, has been nomi­nated for an Oscar 21 times but won only thrice. He told me to stop beating myself about it,” she says.

But it is perhaps precisely this over-thinking and over-feeling that makes Shefali Shah who she is: a great actor forever in search of her next great part.

actorcinemaJaideep AhlawatShefali ShahThree of Us