Why Lara Dutta is glad that OTT platforms are flourishing

Five years ago, Lara Dutta Bhupathi never thought she’d be this busy professionally in her forties. But with the advent of OTT platforms and the pandemic-assisted boom in viewership of streaming content, actresses like her find themselves spoiled for choice. “The wonderful thing about OTT is that because there are so many platforms, you are addressing different segments of an audience. You have to create content that speaks to all of them,” she says. It has resulted in not just greater representation of characters from different walks of life but also ones that are “real”. “For the longest time, the segment of women aged between 35 and 55 was never addressed. There was nothing about them except for TV, where it was mostly driven by ‘saas-bahu’ serials wherein the women were always projected to be the epitome of sacrifice,” explains Lara. “OTT is an incredible gamechanger for the [entertainment] industry.”

The 43-year-old Lara is now revelling in the freedom she gets by depicting the many shades of women. Since 2020, Lara has done three web series. In Hundred (Disney+ Hotstar), her OTT debut, she played Soumya Shukla, a police officer who isn’t “necessarily the perfect woman” as she showcases an “unapologetically ambitious and manipulative” streak. She followed it up with Hiccups & Hookups (Lionsgate Play), which highlights the desires of a single parent as she negotiates the daunting world of online dating. In January, she featured in Kaun Banega Shikharwati (ZEE5) as one of the four heiresses to a vanishing royal fortune. “People are now considering me for things they hadn’t before. They are seeing you as an actor rather than a face and personality. You bet that I plan to make most of it,” says Lara.

Yes, there’s plenty of scripts on the table but the actress notes that great quantity doesn’t equate great quality. “I am very fortunate that I have the luxury today and the quantity of work to be able to confidently say ‘No’ to something,” she says. “I want to do projects that give the audience an opportunity to say ‘Wow, she can do this as well’, and as an artist have the satisfaction to play something I haven’t done before.”

Sometimes that opportunity comes through a feature as it did with Bell Bottom in which she played former prime minister Indira Gandhi. It was her co-star Akshay Kumar who felt she had the “body language and gravitas” to pull off the part. With make-up and prosthetics, Lara was almost unrecognisable in the part. “It was a huge responsibility to play such a larger-than-life person,” she says. “You can’t go wrong in portraying her. To do a bad job would be pretty much the end of my career.” Thankfully, she was lauded for her performance and recognised as the best actress in a supporting role at the Dadasaheb Phalke International Film Festival Awards 2022 in Mumbai recently.

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