The Lunchbox lady Nimrat Kaur continues to make waves abroad. Last week she attended the prestigious Screen Actors’ Guild Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles where she rubbed shoulders with some of her biggest childhood idols.
“It was like a dream,” Nimrat says from LA where she is parked for a bit to further explore the international market. “I was standing on the same carpet as Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston and Ethan Hawke. It was as if I had walked into my favourite dream.”
Nimrat says she was too shy to speak to anyone except Ethan Hawke. “When I saw him on the red carpet I just had to tell him that Great Expectations was one of my favourite films. I blurted it out nervously. He was very nice to me. But to go and speak to Meryl Streep or Julia Roberts was beyond me.”
She admits The Lunchbox and now her stint on the American series Homeland have brought her global recognition.
Call her the female Irrfan Khan and she says, “That’s a very, very great compliment. To be bracketed with someone who has done Indian cinema proud all over the world is very gratifying.
But I’m a long way from that achievement. Yes, The Lunchbox and Homeland have got me some recognition outside India.”
Nimrat returns in the first week of February, to India to do her first full-fledged mainstream commercial film. “It’s a thriller called Air Lift and I am cast opposite Akshay Kumar. He is an actor known to be supportive of newcomers. So I don’t feel nervous.”
Nimrat sees herself straddling both Western and Indian cinema. “I am in LA right now assessing scripts. Something concrete may materialise soon, till then I am just happy floating in the space that God has created for me.”
