Many lives: Actor & entrepreneur Lara Dutta Bhupathi is a woman on the go

At a time when the film industry, facing its worst crisis in a long while, went into a cocoon, Lara Dutta Bhupathi found herself in one of the most productive phases of her life.

Between 2020 and now, at the height of the pandemic, she had three web series — Hundred (Disney+ Hotstar), Hiccups & Hookups (Lionsgate Play), Kaun Banegi Shikharwati (ZEE5) — and a film, Bell Bottom, where she essayed “the role of a lifetime” as Indira Gandhi. She also organised the biggest celebrity-driven fundraiser for Covid relief in India in collaboration with TiE (The IndUS Entrepreneurs, a Silicon Valley-headquartered non-profit with a network of Indian-origin entrepreneurs, investors and business leaders in the US, Europe and APAC), raising Rs 20.3 crore. And, she expanded her beauty and skincare range, Arias (her daughter’s name, Saira, read backwards), to fragrances and home furnishings.

For our long-distance conversation, with her in Mumbai and me in Delhi, she has tea by her side “to activate the brain cells”. And I have my morning staple for the very same reason — a tall glass of cold coffee, strong but no longer as sinfully sweet as it used to be not very many moons ago.

For Bell Bottom, where Lara Dutta Bhupathi disappears and Indira Gandhi emerges in a transformation that would leave anyone gobsmacked, she won the “Best Actress in a Supporting Role” award at the Dadasaheb Phalke International Film Festival Awards 2022 (not to be confused with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India’s highest accolade in the field of cinema).

A fictionalised account of the plane hijackings India witnessed between 1981 and 1984 (there were six such incidents during this period), Bell Bottom came about during the very early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty was at its peak, everyone was under house arrest and the future felt grim and hopeless. “I got a call from Akshay Kumar (who enacts a R&AW agent in the film) asking if I’d play Mrs Gandhi,” says Dutta Bhupathi, laughing at the incredulity of his suggestion. “‘How and where is the resemblance?’ I asked him,” she says. “But then he’d also got me to do Blue, a film where I had to be pretty much underwater most of the time, when he knew I was severely hydrophobic.” So, she decided to go with it.

After three hours of makeup artiste Vikram Gaikwad and his team working on her, and her daughter worrying that she’d suffocate under all that silicone, when she stood in front of the mirror, “I had to literally look myself in the eye to find myself behind that face”. When she sent her “Mrs Gandhi” picture to Akshay Kumar, his response was: “Don’t go to Delhi looking like that.”

While Bell Bottom didn’t make much of a mark, Dutta Bhupathi’s acting won her critical acclaim. Looking like Indira Gandhi was one thing, capturing her personality quite the other. Researching for that, of course, included watching hours of her footage, and reading up on the political and social environment at the time.

But Dutta Bhupathi, it turns out, also had an insider’s view into Indira Gandhi’s personality. “My father (a wing commander) used to fly Mrs Gandhi while he was in the air force,” she says. “I kind of grew up listening to stories about her: that she would not suffer fools; was sort of cut-and-dried in her interactions; would refuse help from her ADCs (aide-de-camp) to get in and out of a chopper; was very precise and knowledgeable, and wanted to know minute details of the flight route; ate very light when on her rallies; kept herself physically very fit; rarely used her hands when in a conversation, and I’m exactly the opposite. She also made very little eye movement but there’d be this laser-cut gaze when she had a point to make. It was stitching all of that together.”

Shooting during the pandemic, when all filming had virtually stopped given the size, scale and logistical nightmare of carrying out such an exercise without inviting the virus, was also a different ball game. “Nobody really knew how to function in this completely new environment,” recalls the former Miss Universe. “We went to Scotland, where the entire cast and crew worked in a very tight bio bubble. We were wearing masks for 12 to 13 hours a day. There was no stepping out, not even to buy a bottle of shampoo. If you needed something, you had to inform specific people who’d buy it and deliver it to you.”

But everybody, she says, understood that at the end of the day, it was a matter of their livelihood, so nobody complained. From Scotland, she was off shooting in Mandawa, Rajasthan, and then back in Mumbai for the Lionsgate series. “The filming in the peak of the pandemic sent out a message to the industry that yes, this can be done even in this very difficult time.”

May 2021: India was reeling under the worst of the second Covid wave. Her husband, tennis player Mahesh Bhupathi, had also tested Covid-positive. “It was a really dark time. I used to dread the phone ringing because of all the bad news it brought,” she says. This is when she got a call from sports scientist Shayamal Vallabhjee asking her if she’d help him organise a Covid relief fund-raiser with TiE, which was willing to match up to $1 million. In no time, film personalities (like Anil Kapoor, Amitabh Bachchan, Rana Daggubati, Karan Johar), sportspersons like Shikhar Dhawan, fashion designers, wellness gurus and so on came on board.

For a mind that’s constantly ticking, entrepreneurship was a natural choice and skincare a familiar sector to start with. “I will complete 26 years in the glamour industry in 2022,” says Dutta Bhupathi who turns 44 in April. “Having used innumerable products, I realised apart from some Ayurvedic brands, we don’t have one single homegrown Indian skincare brand that addresses our needs. The international products are very expensive and what works for Caucasian skin doesn’t really for Indian skin since we age very differently.”

Having launched Arias three years ago, “after two years of R&D”, she is determined to make a dent as the go-to, affordable, quality Indian brand in a very competitive segment. “The audience I am catering to is the cohort of women in the age group of 30 to about 55, and I hope to cover various aspects of their life, from beauty, home, kids to possibly fashion and wellness,” she says, adding that she’s pretty hands-on with every vertical: “R&D, design, quality control, placement, marketing.”

Turning the spotlight back on cinema, have the roles for women evolved? “Certainly,” she says, “and that’s also because you have a lot more women on the crew than ever before — writers, content creators, directors, producers. But there hasn’t been that much change on screen as far as the man is concerned — the hero complex remains.” That, in a sentence, is the story of our society.