Freida Pinto covers ‘Interview’ August 2020 and looks sexy in a special spread photographed by Mert & Marcus. The 26-year-old Indian actress sits down for a chat with the magazine and talks about her career, family and her soul mate, Dev Patel.
Before becoming famous with the movie ‘Slumdog millionaire’, Freida admits she had to audition a lot. “Yes, I did. And I was rejected at almost every one of them. [laughs] One person said, ‘She doesn’t look too Indian’, Freida says. However, this seems to have helped the actress in her international career. “I guess it has, actually. I like the roles that I have played to date. I’m not saying I look Arab or I look Spanish or anything, but I could if I wanted to. And I have” she told the ‘Interview’.
Besides movies, Freida also staged a Kafka play. “Occupational Hazard. Actually that wasn’t a Kafka play, it was Rosalyn Drexler, but it was based on a story Kafka wrote [“The Hunger Artist”]. It was part of a joint production we did with the Ionesco play The Chairs. I was 19,” the actress recalls.
On what she takes away from a project, Pinto says that, “I always imagined that I would learn something each time that I would take to a new project, then I realized that each new project poses a completely different challenge. I guess confidence is the only thing that I take from project to project, but I’m always open to learning everybody’s style — the director, the actor I’m working with. Not everybody is, ‘Okay, let’s discuss this scene and how we’re going to do it.’ And some over-discuss it. So I’m just open to everything. But it is all about being able to do it as a team. And there are some people who can do it fabulously as a team, and some people who like to work as individuals, like they’re the only people on the team, and you’ve just got to learn to work in that person’s style as well,” she said.
Speaking about her family and the house she grew up in, Pinto says that, “My mum was academically inclined because she was the headmistress of a school, but if there was anything that really was common in the family, it was music. My parents love Willie Nelson. And I think almost all my family members have been band members at some point in time. My sister and I were probably the only two people who did not form or join a band, though we performed at home.”
On falling for Dev Patel, her ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ co-star, Freida told the magazine that, “I just think it was both of us sitting in the same boat. For both Dev and me, Slumdog was our first film, and it became so massive that you had to preserve and protect what you had before, that innocence, without getting sucked in. And who better to do it with than someone who knows what you’re thinking? Dev had never done a talk show before — his first was [Late Show With] David Letterman — and he said to me, ‘You have to come with me and give me moral support.’ So it was very much a case of being there for my friend. Nothing we did was planned. We were making a lot of mistakes, but we were together, and most of the time our mistakes were looked on as, ‘Oh my god, that’s so cute.’”
Freida confesses that she and Dev are soul mates, “I don’t think anybody — not even family or friends — can understand what the two of us have been through. As beautiful as it is, there are parts of it that just become a bit tiring to deal with. The paparazzi, for example, and not having privacy. He made a statement unknowingly once and he said, ‘Oh, she is like my soul mate,’ and we were not dating or anything back then, and it became this big hoopla. Like, ‘Oh my god! How could he have said that? What does that mean?’ But I guess he was right in a way; we are soul mates,” the actress says.
Photos courtesy of Interview Magazine
