Interview: Freida Pinto, actress

IN THE past three years, Freida Pinto has travelled the world making movies and then promoting them at festivals and premieres.

She tells me that one of her first jobs before Slumdog Millionaire was hosting a travel show on Asian TV. She must be a dab hand at travelling light then? “Oh no,” says Pinto, grinning ruefully. “I’m an excess luggage girl.”

Pinto certainly carries plenty of baggage. She’s only made six films but there’s a burden of expectations loaded on to her slim shoulders. Her performance in Slumdog Millionaire was a supporting role, so Hollywood wants to know if she can carry a film on her own. The gossip magazines want to know whether she and her co-star Dev Patel are as loved-up as Brangelina, or as tempestuous as Taylor and Burton. And in India, there seems to be a certain sniffiness towards Pinto because in her rapid rise to international fame she bypassed Bollywood and Indian movies.

“The success of Slumdog sounds like a fairytale,” she says, “but I actually struggled more after the film than I did before, because I had to persuade people I deserved the accolade. And I am not famous at all in India. When I was filming Trishna in Rajasthan, everyone was far more excited to meet the actress playing my mother, because she had been in many Bollywood movies.”

Although brought up in a Mangalorean Catholic family, Pinto says she had always set her sights on an international stage and since Slumdog she hasn’t even played many Indian characters – she was an Arab princess in Black Gold, a Greek priestess in The Immortals, a Palestinian in Julian Schnabel’s Miral, and an American vet in Rise Of The Planet Of The Planet Of The Apes. “I spent a long time working on my sutures in that film,” she says. “I wasn’t the neatest, but by the end of filming, if you were a chimp, and not too fussy, I could do the job.”

India may not see her as representative of their cinema, but internationally Pinto has found herself taking on an almost educational role with foreign press: “I get asked some strange questions – like does India have transport? And they always ask why I can speak English, and I have to explain that for 300 years, we were colonised by the British.”

Trishna is only Pinto’s second movie set in India and, like Slumdog, it combines Asian actors and settings with a British script and director. Of course, in 2008 for Slumdog, Danny Boyle had to plead with money men to cast an untested actress as the grown up Latika, living miserably as a mobster’s moll in a Mumbai apartment. Four years later, director Michael Winterbottom says he begged Pinto to sign up for Trishna, and her name brought a substantial boost to the picture’s budget.

Based on Thomas Hardy’s Tess Of The D’Urbervilles, Winterbottom’s version relocates the heroine to modern-day Rajasthan, where she is a rural village girl who captivates the wealthy son of a property developer. He offers her a job at his father’s hotel in Jaipur, an opportunity to increase the family’s income that she cannot refuse. Eventually a romance blossoms and she follows him, as his live-in girlfriend, to Mumbai, where she encounters issues of status, privilege and macho arrogance.

Initially, Winterbottom assured Pinto that the film would be “80 per cent English”, the language Pinto speaks at home with her family. The rest would be Hindi, “which I speak, but not every day”. When Winterbottom started scouting around Rajasthan, he decided Pinto should learn a local Rajasthan dialect too. “But there is a different dialect every 100 kilometres in Rajasthan, so I had to sit down with a friend of my mother’s and learn the sounds from her. Then when I met the actors playing my family I had to adapt to fit in with them too,” says Pinto.

“Michael took all this very lightly. I suppose in a way it was a confidence booster because he really did believe that I could do it, but this was three weeks before we started filming, and I was being asked to learn a new dialect, and then speak it well enough to improvise dialogue. And the filming was very hot, and the working days were very long – about nine hours.”

The payoff has been her best reviews to date, especially for the film’s early scenes, where Trishna’s vulnerability is almost wordless. Riz Ahmed, of Four Lions, is Jay, Trishna’s lover, and a conflation of Hardy’s sensualist Alec d’Urberville and the more spiritual Angel Clare. Jay views Trishna as sweet, and submissive. Yet Pinto leaves us in no doubt that Trishna is a more turbulent personality, and the conflict turns tragic when she tries to reconcile modern freedoms with her more familiar and traditional values.

The film also includes Pinto’s strongest sexual material to date, although she played a very sexy oracle with superhuman powers and a super-fit body in the high-gloss Immortals.

“But it’s not my bottom in that film,” she laughs. “The first day I walked on set, the director Tarsem Singh said to me, ‘Right this is a sex scene, but don’t worry – we’re going to get you the best butt in Montreal.’ It was very flattering but that was a body double, not me.

“If a director asks me to perform an intimate scene, then I think to myself: ‘Is it gratuitous or is it true to the film?’ And with Trishna, it was amply justified because it’s the sexual tension that keeps Trishna’s relationship alive. And it’s still very conservative for a Michael Winterbottom film. That’s not to say that shooting those scenes was easy. It was actually really awkward, with Riz and I mapping them out, telling each other: ‘put your legs there’. And watching it with an audience is a bit awkward.”

While Trishna is a homecoming of sorts for Pinto, who is still based in Mumbai, the movie hasn’t been screened in India yet, and I wonder what the response will be there. Pinto’s is surprisingly bullish: “The only thing I didn’t consider was how an Indian audience would view Trishna. It’s fair to say in a country of 1.2 billion people, sex is prevalent,” she says, dryly. “I didn’t even think about how my family would feel about the love scenes.”

There is another love story, off-screen, which Pinto tries to protect although she’s well aware that her relationship with Slumdog co-star Dev Patel has a widespread romantic appeal. “When we go into restaurants,” she confesses, “I sometimes hear people going ‘awwwwww’ when they see us. That’s the power of Jamal and Latika. But I think the film bonded us because we went through so much together. Even before we were dating, Dev told a paper, very innocently, that I was his soulmate. It started a huge buzz, and it turned out that he was right: we are soulmates.”

Long periods filming in different countries have kept them apart for large chunks of time, although they use Skype to touch base and fly out to see each other on set. The most obvious option however, would be to make another movie together.

“Mmmmmmm,” says Pinto, politely. “But it couldn’t be a love story. I think after Slumdog, how could we top that story? I would like a comedy perhaps, because Dev makes me laugh all the time. Or maybe we have to be the complete opposite and hate each other like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” She brightens a little. “Or murderers? That would be amazing.” «

Black Gold is in cinemas now. Trishna is released on Friday.