Divya Unny with a Y in the end, she specifies. With that name and the actor tag, she had obviously been confused for the other Divya Unni (with an ‘i’), who was once active in the Malayalam film industry. The younger Divya is happy with this association, even as many ask her about the ‘comeback’ after going away to the US. She corrects them all. But funnily enough there is more in common between the two. Divya Unny too dances, classically — the South Indian Bharatanatyam, though she was raised in Mumbai. But then the Bollywood actor’s foray into Malayalam may not be all that easy. She’s had a couple of bad experiences in Kerala.
“I was meeting a popular director to talk about a film. He had asked to meet him at a hotel and I was alone and apprehensive. But I thought I should be positive. He then gave me examples of famous actresses from the Malayalam film industry, who according to him, have made it only because they have accepted propositions from their respective producers and directors. I remember his exact words. He said, ‘No actress in Malayalam cinema makes it without providing favours to the director or producer’,” Divya remembers the first of those bitter experiences from two years ago. She asked the director to book a flight back to Mumbai the next morning and was gone.
Sadly Divya had such nasty experiences only in Kerala, the homeland of her parents. “They had migrated to Mumbai some 50 years ago, but made sure we visit every year. And we have spoken Tamil and Malayalam at home,” Divya says. Her mother is no more but standing at the Guruvayoor temple she can still feel her presence and so she will always come back to Kerala. Her first film too was with a Malayali director — the late Rajesh Pillai — who cast her as Manoj Bajpayee’s wife in the Hindi version of Traffic.
“It was while shooting for Traffic that I lost my last job. In the hotel room, I get a call telling me the magazine I work for is shutting down! My whole world came crashing down. I was a journalist for eight years!” She ran crying to Manoj Bajpayee who sat her down and told her she had something here to fall back on unlike the others with her who just lost their jobs one fine day.
Realisation struck Divya and she remembered that first day on stage, acting in a play called Mister Happy Maker, and how the applause had made her feel. After all those years of journalism she realised this is where she belonged. “Where I had the power to change a person’s mood!” Nine plays in English came her way before Traffic. And after that there was a small part in Aligarh. Her third film called Tikli and Laxmi Bomb by director Aditya Kriplani is an adaptation of a book, where a few sex workers fight for autonomy in their profession.
“I play a Malayali girl in it!” says the young woman who is a hardcore fan of Mohanlal. “He’s the best actor in the whole world,” she says. She met him only once, and that had been when he was on a cricket field playing for Celebrity Cricket League and she was covering the event. “He asked me to step aside because I was too close to the field!” she remembers, laughing. Hopefully, the bad experiences in Kerala will soon be replaced by good ones and Divya will come to work in her motherland.
