cosmo interview
You’d never have guessed it, but this girl is the kind of
belly-laughing, deliciously audacious energy that rarely
rears its head in Bollywood’s politically correct quarters.
When you hybridise a dainty demeanour with opinions
daring enough to send Indian society into a spiral,
you get Ileana D’Cruz...
By Saumyaa Vohra; Photographs: Anushka Menon“WHY CAN’T
PEOPLE TALK
ABOUT SEX?”
G
oogle Ileana D’Cruz, and
the pictures that fill your
screen are decidedly that of
a ‘simple’ girl, the kind you’d cast as
the quintessential ‘girl next door’. It’s
a typecasting Ileana grudgingly
acknowledges.
“It’s what people usually take me
to be. They think I’m so ‘sweet’. It’s
awful because I’m not like that; at
least, I don’t think I am. I’m a bad*ss!
I don’t go through life with a smile
on my face, and you do not want to
get on my nasty side!” she says,
smiling sweetly.
But a conversation with her thatcomfortably meanders well beyond
cinematic parameters proves that
initial inference dead wrong. Far
more brazen and reformist than most
tender-footed Bollywood actors
would be willing to admit being,
Ileana is less a star, and more a real-
as-f*ck woman with a world view that
our country, and particularly our
society, desperately needs.
It all begins with an unfeigned
admission—of starting out in film
with a total lack of passion. “I kind of
felt like I never really fit in with any
real Bollywood stereotype. And when
I was starting out [in SouthernILEANA D’CRUZ