A few people know Bhanu as Chandralekha from Guns & Gulaabs and for most others down south, she is either Yathramma from Vaazhl or Devi from Imaigal (a short in Modern Love Chennai). She was also recently seen as Gayatri in Bejoy Nambiar’s Por/Dange. Bhanu is a Telugu ammayi brought up in Chandigarh, but she quite swiftly shifts between speaking Tamil and Hindi. “It’s not that I got to watch films in all these languages as a kid, it’s just that I love languages,” Bhanu tells us. “There was no television at home back in the day. I studied in Hindi medium and my parents would speak Telugu at home. But when we talk about films, I rarely watched one or two when I was a kid.”
Starting her professional journey at the age of 16, she took up a job as a newsreader before giving radio and modelling a shot, and finally venturing into cinema. While she explains that she decided to discontinue her PhD in literature and make up for it with all the reading she does, I quickly glance at the pocket-size book of Albert Camus’ Create Dangerously and a script of her next series on the table. “When I don’t have a book with me, I feel empty sometimes. If I like something, I can enjoy it. If not, the book helps me get into a different world. So a book is always a good backup plan. And when you read a book or act in a film, you don’t judge the character but experience their journey. If you don’t create art, you can become an art appreciator. It’s always good. Oru vishayatha pyithiyama therinjikalaam, andha pythiyakaarathanam enaku pudikum. (You can madly learn about something. I like the craziness).”
Reading literature also helps her in choosing characters, Bhanu asserts. She says that a strong woman in Indian cinema is often restricted to someone who smokes, drinks or maybe talks spontaneously. “But even if a woman talks very slowly but does what she wants, she is a strong person. I don’t want to play a woman who tries to be a man, I want to play a woman who knows who she is.” This is something she keeps looking for in scripts. “All my characters so far, fortunately, are full of life; they have a rich inner life. Besides, the influence of literature is always there even in the way I look at my characters. I compare them with the women I have read about and relate how similarly they behave. There are a lot of times the characters don’t do something I have personally done, and the literature I have read helps me. The women I have played have hope, love and courage in them. All we have is acting and that’s deceptive.”