‘I wasn’t afraid to let go of sexy!’ ...reveals young hottie Esha Gupta as she talks about picking hard-hitting roles over the glamorous ones for her innings on the silver screen

‘I wasn’t afraid to let go of sexy!’

...reveals young hottie Esha Gupta as she talks about picking hard-hitting roles over the glamorous ones for her innings on the silver screen

It’s been less than a year since Esha Gupta made her debut on the big screen, but with both her films — Jannat 2 and Raaz 3 — getting the superhit status, she’s already gone on from being a newbie to having a place of her own in Bollywood. The fact that in her upcoming film Chakravyuh, she gets to work with filmmaker Prakash Jha — a director most actors wish to work with — adds a new dimension to her CV. “I’m feeling like Alice in Wonderland, trying to figure out what’s happening or how. All that I do know is that I am moving forward with each day, but there’s no rabbit I am following!” says Esha. More than the hits, what excites the actor is the variety of roles on her platter. In less than a year, Esha has played a simple girl and danced to glam songs in Jannat 2, then she got to look her “ugliest best” in Raaz 3, and now she is playing a no-nonsense cop in Chakravyuh. Point out that it’s the kind of range most actresses take a while to portray, and she says, “I guess I just got lucky! But that’s the real wow factor in my life rather than just the hit tag.” Esha however does admit that she was initially apprehensive about getting typecasted in a glam image onscreen, thanks to her modelling image off-screen. “I knew that my sexy image could go against me, but I was not afraid to cast the glamour aside at all. So I jumped when I was offered these films. In Chakravyuh I play a woman, who’s nearly 10 years older than I am. Jha completely normalises glam girls, and I am glad he did the same to me,” shares Esha. So, which one of her roles did she find the most challenging? “Well, my very first shot in Jannat was canned in Daryaganj (Delhi) amidst a crowd of 5,000. So, that was intimidating for sure, but the film was not much of a tough cookie. The tough one was Raaz 3, because the crying, the screaming and the intensity of it all left me emotionally and physically drained. But I think Chakravyuh is the most challenging. To portray a woman who is a tough-as-nails cop, yet a wife at heart, and do it convincingly was a real challenge,” says Esha. But what about the intimate scenes she’s had to do in her films with co-star Emraan Hashmi? “Well, I have been a model so it was purely work for me. In fact, I saw the films with my parents and they were okay with it,” adds Esha. With this variety to start off, is there a criteria for her next role? “Directors and the story will be the deciding factors. Banners and co-actors, only matter later, but the first priority has to be the character graph,” she says.