4 saturday review Saturday December 4 2021 | the timesthe patriarchy, me and you”) and some
portrait shots of the happy couple.
“I’m not a natural instagrammer, to be
honest,” she says. “I don’t know how to use
it in a way that a lot of actors do. I am a lot
more shy and feel very self-conscious. But
the reason why I will post a few things that
are a glimpse into my personal life is
because I’m happy to do it and I want to
write my own narrative.”
Our chat concludes with Pinto reflect-
ing on her career, especially the dry period.
“Maybe I could’ve done it differently,” she
says. “If I entered the industry now, with
all the movies and TV shows that have
opened the doors for people of colour, it
would be a lot easier for me. But I think not.
No. The journey that I was on was exactly
the journey I needed to be on.”
A Christmas Number One is on Sky
Cinema and Now from December 10‘I’m not
playing the
typical kind
of sunshine
character
that people
seem to like
offering me’
chart topper Freida
Pinto and, left, with
Ashley Margolis in A
Christmas Number Onecover story
‘If I can bring cheer
to people’s lives, then I
consider myself lucky’
Freida Pinto is back with a new holiday film, A Christmas Number One.
‘It is a lot of silliness,’ the Slumdog Millionaire star tells Kevin Maher
DON ARNOLD/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGESI
n Freida Pinto’s new
movie, A Christmas
Number One, she plays
a self-involved record
company band manager
who shouts and drinks
and vomits and demeans
and dismisses and swaggers and
eventually falls in love with a long-
haired death metal guitarist with a
dying sister. She becomes the tear-
jerking inspiration for a yuletide
chart-topper sung by a commer-
cially unsuccessful boy band man-
aged by you know who. OK, so it’s
not Nomadland, but, says the 37-
year-old Slumdog Millionaire star,
it’s a movie on its own profoundly
uncomplicated mission: to give our
pandemic-addled world a lift.
“Look, I’m not a frontline worker and
I’m not saving lives,” she says. “And I’m
very much aware of my privilege. But if
within that privilege I can be involved, at
even the smallest percentage level, in
bringing happiness and cheer and enter-
tainment to people’s lives, then I consider
myself lucky to do it at this time.”
Pinto is speaking via Zoom from the
home in Los Angeles that she shares with
her photographer husband, Cory Tran.
She is pregnant, at the start of her third
trimester, and this is her last interview (we
are speaking in the summer) before a
media blackout. (Her boy, Rumi-Ray, was
born last month, announced on the 21st,
via Instagram, with two shots of mother
and child and father and child, cuddling
the newborn in curated frames.)
For now, though, back in the summer,
it’s all about A Christmas Number One, a
film that lurches wildly from Love Actually
wannabe (the Christmas charts bit), to a
single-girl-and-the-city rom-com (all the
Freida bits), to a much bleaker cancer
drama (all the bits featuring the dying
sister). Yet all along there’s that sense that
we know exactly where every frame of this
film is headed — and if it’s not to a happy-
clappy Christmas sing-song, then you can
ask for your money back.
“It is a lot of silliness,” she says, adding
that there was still a certain allure to the
main role. “Because it’s not necessarily the
typical kind of sunshine character that
people seem to like offering me. She has an
actual arc and a trajectory to go through.”
There is backstory here. Pinto hit the big
time with Slumdog Millionaire. She went
from nowhere (she had a successful model-
ling career with Elite Model Management
in India, but in Hollywood movie terms.. .)
to everywhere: the Oscars, talk shows andthe top of the eye-catching “best” lists —
People magazine’s World’s Most Beautiful
People, Vogue’s Top Ten Most Stylish
Women and the LA Times Magazine’s 50
Most Beautiful Women in Film.
There were significant roles too. She
played a Palestinian schoolgirl in Miral
and a primatologist in Rise of the Planet of
the Apes. She played a mystical oracle in
Immortals and an Arab princess in Black
Gold. But then, as she grew increasingly
unhappy with the characters on offer (typ-
ically beautiful, passive and bland), things
got tricky. “One day the well just dried up.
And people stopped giving me what I
wanted. They wanted to fit me into boxes
and a certain category, you know, of the
beautiful girl, damsel in distress kind of
role, but I didn’t want to play these roles
any more. And the more I said no, the
more the offers stopped coming.”
She says it didn’t help that she had no
Indian role models in Hollywood to emu-
late or seek out. “When I first started out,
you have to remember that I came in from
a different country, and there weren’t
many Indians taking up lead roles, defi-
nitely not as many as there are today.”
She says that it’s changed now and she
has just finished shooting a period rom-
com called Mr Malcolm’s List, which is set
in 19th-century England, but features a
diverse cast. “That took a long time to get
off the ground, because it seemed like a
novel concept, casting everyone against
type. But then Bridgerton happened and
suddenly everyone thought, ‘Oh yeah! You
can cast a non-white in the lead role of a
period project!’ That helped ours to get
green-lit.”
She adds that the awakening of identity
politics has also made some of her past
choices problematic. Playing a Palestinianin Miral, for instance, or an Iranian
in Desert Dancer, now seems
slightly dubious within a climate
that increasingly demands like-for-
like on screen. “That shouldn’t have
been allowed then, and it wouldn’t
be allowed today,” she says. “But
back then there wasn’t a bigger
name Palestinian actress to get
Miral off the ground, and it was
only my second movie, I wasn’t
going to be able to change the
system by saying no, and it was my
bread and butter.”
Pinto grew up in Mumbai, with
a school-principal mother and
bank-manager father who had no
interest in nudging their drama-
nut daughter into safer career ter-
ritory. “I had no academic interests, and
was pathetic with numbers,” she says.
“They would’ve worried if I said I wanted
to become a doctor.” The modelling began,
followed by a stint as the host of the Indian
TV travel show Full Circle and a failed
Bond-girl audition for Quantum of Solace.
Then Slumdog Millionaire happened.
Very slowly. The process was stretched out
over six long months of auditions in 2006
for its director, Danny Boyle, who cast his
net across the entire continent, looking for
the right actress to play Latika. “I was kept
on tenterhooks for six months, going in
every month and thinking, ‘What if I’m in?
What if I’m out? Just give me the damn
part!’ But to be fair to Danny, he was just
giving a fair chance to everybody. And in
this case it was, literally, everybody.”
The Slumdog fame was initially dazzling,
but eventually sobering. “All those titles
[Most Beautiful etc] meant nothing to me,
and they still don’t. It’s just everybody
wanting to see you as something else that
you’re not.” She tackled the painful career
drought via some left-field choices (play-
ing a sinister drug-addicted prostitute,
brilliantly, in Love Sonia and an urban
terrorist in the TV series Guerrilla) and by
becoming her own producer. She’s plan-
ning a series about the British spy Noor
Inayat Khan aka Nora Baker, and has re-
cently starred (again, against type) in two
stylish Netflix thrillers, Only and Intrusion.
After a six-year relationship with her
Slumdog co-star Dev Patel that ended in
2014, she became engaged to Tran in 2019
and they married last year. I have been
warned that she is private, but has been re-
cently dipping her toe into the world of
social media self-revelation via Instagram.
Her posts so far mostly feature promotion-
al movie material, inspirational quotes
(“Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s smashdi i s t l b b b n M o g s b a b i nritory“I