It’s an exciting time to be Radhika Apte. The 32-year-old actor has a series of big projects on the horizon and is all set to play British World War II spy Noor Inayat Khan in an untitled English-language project from director Lydia Dean Pilcher.
The film is based on real-life spies in then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s ‘secret army’, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Apte will star as the first female wireless operator to be flown into occupied France during WWII, and the only Indian-origin secret agent of her time. Khan was killed in the line of duty in a German concentration camp. “It’s a very important film I think,” Apte tells us. “Noor was really a very interesting woman and it’s an incredible story.” Apte will be joined in the film by Sarah Megan Thomas who also wrote the script and Castle star Stan Katic.
The actor has recently wrapped up British director Michael Winterbottom’s upcoming feature The Wedding Guest alongside Lion star Dev Patel. When asked if she considers the Indian audience when picking international projects, she quickly replies in the negative. “Not at all. The films will work for people who want to watch them and there will be those who don’t want to. That’s completely fine. I do films because there is an audience out there. It doesn’t matter if they’re Indian, American or European.”
Apte will next be seen in Netflix’s ambitious and highly anticipated Sacred Games , based on the novel by Vikram Chandra. The streaming giant’s first Indian production stars Saif Ali Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui alongside Apte in leading roles. “I’m very excited about the show because I think Netflix has such great content. And this is something great coming from our country. It shows Mumbai in a more real and beautiful light than the world has seen it. I think the makers (Anurag Kashyap and Vikramaditya Motwane) are the best people who could have done it because they know what they’re doing,” emphasises the actor.
Apte also has Sriram Raghavan’s Shoot The Piano Player with Ayushmann Khurana and Tabu coming out later this year. In June Netflix will premiere the omnibus Lust Stories , where Apte features in a short film directed by Anurag Kashyap. Then there’s Gauravv K. Chawla’s Bazaar , with her colleague from Sacred Games , Saif Ali Khan. “I’m happy I’ve got all these projects coming up, and they’re all very different from one another. It’s exciting! I don’t know how it will all go but I’m enjoying my work right now,” she says.
The actor has earned kudos for her performance in art house films such as Madly (2016) and Parched (2015), worked with major stars including Rajnikanth, and acted in regional cinema from across the country. However, she denies any conscious planning towards her diverse career. She states emphatically, “These offers came and of course I said yes!” After 10 years in the industry, what Apte looks out for is a challenge. She explains, “If I feel I’m bored of this, I don’t want to see it then I wouldn’t do it. It has to be something different, something exciting, something that makes you go ‘Whoa! That’s so cool!’”
Apte does acknowledge that the landscape has changed a lot, and it has helped an actor like her. Her last success was the medium budget Pad Man (2018) , which dealt with the sensitive issue of women’s menstrual hygiene while also featuring major stars like Akshay Kumar and Sonam Kapoor. Apte believes the lines between independent and mainstream cinema are blurring day by day. “I think it’s a great thing. A lot of A-list actors want to do more off-beat and smaller films,” she says. “It’s all overlapping now. Anything that generates better films, more work and better content is good.”
Apte is deep in preparation to play Noor Inayat Khan and claims the part is nothing like she’s done before. “My look is so different. The way I speak is so different. Sometimes when I’m in costume I can’t recognise myself. There’s a lot of research [undertaken] and of course we’ve added our own interpretation,” she states.
What attracted Apte to the role is that there aren’t many stories out there about women spies and people of Indian origin involved in the second World War. The actor elaborates, “I just feel that that it’s a very inspiring story about these three women. And we all need a little bit of inspiration in our current times, you know?”
