Subscribe

RSS Feed (xml)

Powered By

Skin Design:
Free Blogger Skins

Powered by Blogger

Jumat, 26 Desember 2008

Freida & fame

That’s because Freida, along with the rest of the cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire, the Danny Boyle-directed movie, are the latest darlings of the international film festival circuit. Danny, the director of movies like Trainspotting, chose Mumbai as the setting for Slumdog Millionaire, the story of a boy who enters Kaun Banega Crorepati to find his ladylove. Freida plays the part of the beloved.

She’d been doing a travel show for a while, and “nothing was happening” when the casting director for Slumdog came to India and Frieda learnt that they were auditioning for the movie. “I just couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I mean, it was so big – I’d studied one of Danny’s films back in college at St Xavier’s (Mumbai)!” She had to audition for six months till, to her disbelief, she got the role. “I was ecstatic. I was screaming and jumping around, and my mom came and saw me and said that she wouldn’t stop me. ‘Go ahead and jump,’ she said, ‘You deserve it.’ At that time, no one could fathom how big the opportunity was.”

That she did, and it paid off – she says that when she started touring internationally with Dev, the response they got as Indian actors was phenomenal. “In Toronto, the film got a standing ovation. It’s true that people have discovered Mumbai through the film. It’s changed the perception that it’s a poor city. They’ve seen it in the film as a big metropolitan city, the financial capital, a power centre... The film’s put Mumbai on the map, and it’s making a mark for itself,” she says.

Freida was in LA when she heard of the terror attack in Mumbai. “My heart goes out to all those who lost their lives or loved ones in the attack,” she says.

A couple of days after the attack, Freida was rushing off to London again. She’s been so busy touring the world for Slumdog, she says, that she hasn’t had time to consider other offers yet. “It’s so funny. I can sit in a rickshaw in Mumbai and no one will recognise me, but in LA, they can tell who I am now,” she giggles.