If things had played out differently, Chitrangda Singh would have been a part of the first instalment of director Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai (2020) itself. It’s not something she regrets, and for good reason. “Honey had gotten in touch with me for a song in the first film. They wanted to put a special song for the theatrical release. But that got dropped because the film went to OTT,” recalls the actor.
Funnily, her loss turned out to be her gain. Today, Singh is winning praise for her turn in Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders, the second part of the Netflix murder mystery franchise. She recalls Trehan approaching her when she was shooting for Housefull 5. “He messaged me, saying, ‘Do you know what you’re doing in January-February?’ I said, ‘I am shooting with you’,” she laughs.
Only when she sat for a meeting with Trehan did the actor learn that it was Raat Akeli Hai 2 with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Radhika Apte. Singh, who plays a grief-stricken mother in the crime thriller, says the director’s brief to her was to convey her emotions through body language. “I had to remind myself that the energy of this woman is somebody who has lost her son. So, I doubled my [emotional] weight and dragged myself because the woman doesn’t even want to even live anymore.”
It also gave her an opportunity to be a part of a story that offers social commentary on the disparities existing within the society. A plot point in the film involves children falling sick due to a poisonous gas leaked from a factory. For Singh, who is a mother, it hit home. “As a mother, I also worry about the water we’re drinking. When I was first reading the script, we were largely thinking of scenes and character graph. But while shooting, I realised that social commentary is such an important part of the film. What a character does in the end is because there is no justice.”
To Chitrangda Singh, co-star Nawazuddin Siddiqui is all about improvisation. She says, “Even if he says the same line 10 times, every time he’ll change [things] in it.”
About Deepti Naval’s nuanced act, she says, “When you see her off camera, you know what she’s doing, but when you see it on the monitor, the impact [is unbelievable].”
