How Angrezi Medium has ushered in the new era of Kareena Kapoor Khan

“Next time, you should not ask who is in the film, you should ask what the film is,” Anurag Kashyap famously advised Kareena Kapoor Khan in the rapid fire segment of the popular chat show Koffee With Karan. This was in 2014.

Six years later, Kareena seems to have taken his advice and signed Homi Adajania’s Angrezi Medium. For the first time in her two-decade-long career, she is doing a film where she is neither playing the lead role, nor is it headlined by a top star. Undoubtedly, her co-star Irrfan Khan is one of the finest actors of our generation, but he is not someone who gets a Rs 20-crore opening at the box office because of his mere presence in a film.

Last year, in an interview with Rajeev Masand, Kareena admitted that Angrezi Medium was a departure from her “comfort zone”. She said, “It’s a small but interesting part and I think that I just wanted to get out of my comfort zone and do a movie that would throw me into a different milieu and see how it goes. Whether it’s Homi or it’s Irrfan and Deepak (Dobriyal), I think it’s all a different world for me to be a part of, so that would be interesting.”

It is not that Kareena, who once told PTI that she was “a commercial actress”, has not experimented with offbeat films. If she has a Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Golmaal Returns in her filmography, she also took risks with a Chameli and Dev. But even these films were either centred around her (Chameli) or she starred alongside big names (Dev, Omkara and Yuva).

Kareena confessed in the interview with Rajeev Masand that she has become more performance-oriented now, and wants to do something “different”. She said that she was inspired by her husband, Saif Ali Khan, who was the first mainstream Bollywood star to headline a web series - Sacred Games - to experiment with her career along with big-budget entertainers like Advait Chandan’s Laal Singh Chaddha and Karan Johar’s Takht.

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With the change in her outlook now, Kareena believes that the length of the role is secondary to the impact it has on the audience. She shot for just 10 days for Angrezi Medium, in which she plays a police officer.

“An actor rises above their parts and the key is to make something great out of it. In Angrezi Medium, I play a cop. It’s a small part, but I hope I have made something significant and memorable out of that small role. Even if you play a small part in a relevant film, then you have done your job,” she told Gulf News in an interview.

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