Kareena Kapoor Khan stars in her first OTT film

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Kareena Kapoor Khan has been in showbiz for 23 years. And she makes a new debut—in her first OTT released film, Jaane Jaan, which hits Netflix on September 21.

The actor is gung-ho about this new area, and feels that she is beginning all over again. During the long lockdown phase, she never had any release, never did any web series (her sister Karisma Kapoor did Mentalhood). She starred in Laal Singh Chaddha last year,

“OTT is something we watch from close quarters at home, so we must make sure of fabulous content and great performances,” she feels. “OTT is an actor’s medium as much as the director’s. In any case, actors must try out everything now, and be at their best. I did receive offers for OTT series in the past few months, but there was nothing that met these requirements.”

Coming to this specific release, she chirps, “Jaane Jaan was the happy ending to a decade-long wait to work with Sujoy Ghosh, a wonderful, lovely, fantastic director! He wanted to make this film since a decade, but for his own reasons, he had put it on a backburner. And I wanted to work with him since that time! We had discussed some other projects as well. But I wanted to do a Kahani-Badla kind of thriller, which is my weakness as a genre to be viewed. As it is, we make very few stories in that field, and this one ticked all the boxes.”

Sujoy, she feels, really pushes an actor and emotionally drains them to bring out a more intense side. At once, Jaane Jaan is a thriller, a murder mystery, a love saga, and, finally, a story of a mother and child.

So does the real-life mother that she is influence her acting, or even vice-versa—that is, she gets tips from her role? She shakes her head dismissively. “Maybe something may creep in subconsciously, but otherwise, not at all!” she replies.

The big news is that Kareena has just turned producer, and that too with a murder mystery that is in English! She smiles, “Yes. I am co-producing The Buckingham Murders. It will premiere on October 14 at the BFI London Film Festival. Hansal Mehta is the director and I again play a mother, and a detective.”

How was the experience of working with Vijay Varma and Jaideep Ahlawat, her co-stars? “I have watched their work a lot and I knew how good both are,” she says. “They were very prepared and come from a different school of acting and improvising. I had to be on my toes, but even then, during a shot, they would positively surprise me so much that I would just gape at what they had done and had to do a retake!”