Aditi Rao Hydari will be collaborating with her Kaatru Veliyidai director, Mani Ratnam, for the second time. While she hasn’t stated which project, reports suggest that it is a multi-starrer project featuring Vijay Sethupathi, Fahadh Faasil, Simbu, Jyothika and Aishwarya Rajesh.
Confirming the news with The Indian Express, Aditi said, “I will get onto Mani Ratnam’s next, which I am extremely excited about. I am working with him for the second time and also, another film I have in which I would be working with a National Award-winning director down south. So, it is exciting. The five-year-old in me is jumping up and down.”
The film, bankrolled by Ratnam’s Madras Talkies, has composer AR Rahman on board along with with ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan.
While Aditi isn’t new to Tamil cinema, considering she made her Tamil debut in the National Award winning film Sringaram in 2007, she did, however, return to the industry 10 years later. Having played a variety of roles in the Hindi film industry such as the soft spoken Rama in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Delhi-6, the broken Roshni in Murder 3, and the lovestruck Lalitha in London, Paris, New York, 2017 was, however, a rather different year for the 31-year-old actress.
In Kaatru Veliyidai, starring opposite Karthi Sivakumar, Aditi played Leela Abraham, a doctor who falls in love with an Air Force pilot called VC. While the film sets out to explore the troubled relationship between a young couple, Aditi’s Leela is often found bearing the brunt of an emotionally abusive relationship, something that VC almost repents towards the end of the film. The film didn’t really do well, generating mixed reactions on the depiction of love and toxic relationship between the two characters.
Read: Silverscreen’s review of Kaatru Veliyidai
In Bhoomi, with Sanjay Dutt playing her father, Aditi plays a young girl who gets gangraped before her wedding. As a survivor, she gets slutshamed and even ends up with her wedding cancelled, but her father sets out taking revenge. The film, too, didn’t make much of an impact.
Read: Silverscreen’s review of Bhoomi
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This year, Aditi has starred in Bhansali’s Padmaavat as Mehrunissa, the wife of Alauddin Khilji. Having witnessed how barbaric her husband is, with him beheading her father, Mehrunissa is seen as the woman resigned to a fate of rape and abuse. But she isn’t weak and holds her ground when it comes to saving Rani Padmavati and Ratan Singh. She goes against her husband and eventually isn’t afraid to face him, even telling him that she wishes he doesn’t succeed in getting Padmavati.
Unlike most of Aditi’s roles in the past, her role as Mehrunissa has so far been the most impressive one.