100 Hours 100 Stars: Kirti Kulhari Opens Up On Four More Shots Please; Says “I Don’t Want To Play The Good Girl”

100 Hours 100 Stars is an initiative by Fever FM, Radio Nasha and Radio One to encourage the people of our country to extend a helping hand and donate to the PM CARES fund amid the coronavirus pandemic. To lend support to the cause, Kirti Kulhari took out some time from her quarantine routine and opened up about her character Anjana Menon in the web series Four More Shots Please.

Talking about her character choices, Kirti shared, “As an actor, I don’t want to play it safe anymore. I don’t want to play the good girl, I don’t want to play the one who does everything right, the one who is independent and strong and all of that. Of course I’ve been doing that for a while, in different forms. But I think every time people start seeing you a certain way, and it’s obviously to do with how they see you on-screen, and then they start believing you are this person. I want to keep breaking that for people.”

In the second season of the show, Anjana’s character explores the tabooed topic of extramarital affairs. Opening up about the same, the actress stated, “There is a part of Anjana which has justified all of this saying ‘I didn’t cheat anybody, I was honest about the whole thing.’ But having said that, I’m saying even if she went into it knowing what it was, there’s something that Shashank’s character (portrayed by Sameer Kochhar) tells her at the end of the season, he says ‘even if you had known this is not an open marriage, would you have been able to stop yourself?’ That’s a question to really ponder upon because my idea, as an actor, is while it is great to have everybody’s empathy as a character and be like, people justifying what you did, why you did it and being with you on your journey, I feel the whole point is to show that even if someone does it, even if someone has an extramarital affair, knowing everything, and they choose to go into it, my job as an actor is to show you the other side. Not to get your sympathy, not for you to empathize with me but just to show you that listen, things happen.”

She continued to add, “So, for me, I don’t see Anjana as someone who’s sorted. Yes, there is a part of her that’s sorted, she seems very sorted in her professional life and it happens to a lot of us. We have this one side to us which is very sorted, mature, you know what you’re doing, you’re very much in control and then you have the other side where you yourself wonder sometimes that why would I do this. Why did I put myself in this situation? So that’s what makes a character interesting for me and I think that’s what I would like to always work on as an actor to show you different sides of a character. One thing I really run away from is one-dimensional characters.”