Deepika Padukone,India’s most popular actress,has a vision for what itmeans to be atruly global superstar
BY ASTHA RAJVANSHI/MUMBAI
CULTURE
DEEPIKA PADUKONE NEVER SET OUT to take India to the world. She wanted the world to come to India. As the most popular actress in the world’s most populous country, she’s often asked if she’s going to move to Hollywood. “My mission has always been to make a global impact while still being rooted in my country,” she says on her home turf in Mumbai one humid morning in April, while on a break from shooting India’s first aerial-action film, Fighter.
It’s fitting that Padukone’s photo shoot for this story is happening inside Mehboob Studios, home to some of the most legendary movies made in Hindi-language cinema, from the seminal Oscar-nominated Mother India in 1957 to Padukone’s own Chennai Express in 2013.
The 37-year-old is now a legend in her own right. She has appeared in more than 30 films, won numerous awards, and generated nearly $350 million in global box-office revenues. Today, she is the highest-paid actress in India. Among her legions of fans and nearly 74 million followers on Instagram, Padukone is fondly called the Queen of Bollywood.
Padukone’s 16-year career is an exception to the rule in Bollywood, the cutthroat Hindi-language film industry, known for prizing youth and continually looking for the next new thing. She suspects this has to do with India’s growing influence in the world. “Indian cinema has transcended borders and Indians are everywhere, so the fame goes wherever you go,” she says.
Smartphones, streaming services, and social media have helped find new audiences for India’s century-old film industry, which tells about 1,500 stories a year on the screen. At the same time, Netflix and Amazon are also eager to create content that caters to a vast South Asian viewership of nearly 2 billion people around the world.
But they are not necessarily looking only at Bollywood. The recent success of Telugu-language films like Bahubali and RRR has forced the question of whether Bollywood can still dominate the Indian film industry (which comprises many regional languages). All the while, tensions simmer under the surface as a rightward-leaning Indian government monitors the stories India tells about itself on celluloid.
PADUKONE HAS BEEN at the crossroads of all these forces, but remains unfazed. After all, she grew up in the enterprising city of Bangalore—known as the Silicon Valley of India, and now called Bengaluru—at a time when India was undergoing economic liberalization. Vijay Subramaniam, Pad
