When director Sajin Baabu called Srijith Ramanan, a professor at the National School of Drama, Thrissur, asking for a female actor who could perform and would not be shy to sing in public, he was told about Divya Gopinath. She had then just played a small role as Jameela, wife of Parangi Majid, in Rajeev Ravi’s Kammattipadam. Divya went for an audition in Thiruvananthapuram and became Sreelatha, a young married woman, who would often be wooed by the title character of the film Ayaal Sassi, played by Sreenivasan.
Even when she didn’t shy away from singing in public, Divya was tense about acting with a senior actor like Sreenivasan. “But then, he would come and tell in the sets the dialogues that he is supposed to say in the film,” Divya says.
In the film, Sassi would often kid about being in love with Sreelatha and she would shoo him away. “On the sets, he would always sit with us, not separate, share many anecdotes and jokes. Once we asked him about preparing scripts and he narrated an episode of an aspiring writer coming to him with bundles of notebooks, asking him to read it. They said it’ll take ‘only nine hours to read’. It was not published by anyone and they came to him as a last resort. He advised us never to approach anyone like that with a script.” His wit is spontaneous, she says.
Despite the tensions she mentioned, Divya had pulled off Sreelatha smoothly. Acting had come to her life in college days, when she was doing B.Com at St Xavier’s Women's College, Aluva. “I have acted in school plays. But it is in college that it became serious. My professors, Aparna Lakshmi and Patricia had been hugely encouraging. Then I began working with my sir theatre activist Sasidharan Naduvil.” She appeared in plays like Hecuba, Udaali and Misty Mountains of Mahabharata. She joined a theatre group called Remembrance in Kozhikode. Recently, she was seen as Mymoona in Deepu Sasidharan’s Khasakinte Ithihasam. “It was Tharima (actor) or I that played the part, in different locations.”
Kammattipadam happened after an audition in a Kochi office. “I like to keep a balance between theatre and cinema,” says the young actor who, after finishing her Masters, is now doing M. Phil at the School of Drama. Ayaal Sassi, her second, has been a wonderful experience full of music and laughter, in a friendly set of ADs (‘Junia especially’), ‘editor Ajayettan and cinematographer Pappu chettan’. Her third film is a woman-oriented feature by Suresh Narayanan, Irattajeevitham, where she will be seen with actor Aatmaja.
