Richie Mehta Had All The Answers To My Questions While Filming 'Poacher': Nimisha Sajayan

Nimisha Sajayan, one of Malayalam cinema’s most promising young actors today has been making her presence felt across industries through her quiet intensity in parts. The actress has already crossed the borders with back-to-back projects in different regional languages like the recently released Tamil Blockbuster Jigarthanda Doublex (2023). The actress led the star cast of the recently released docu-fiction series Poacher (2024), created by Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Richie Mehta. The show also featuring Roshan Mathew, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Kani Kusruti among others in an ensemble, deals with a wild confession that unravels an astonishing world of wild elephant poaching networks.

The actress shares her experience shooting for her very first streaming show as a different experience from the work she usually does in films. “It's very different from how we shoot for films in a way. In the morning, you might be shooting for a scene from episode one and in the evening you might be shooting another scene from episode five or six. So it becomes hard keeping track of the emotional journey and arc of  what Mala, my character in ‘Poacher’ is going through, or what the other characters are going through at a particular moment of time.”

The actress also opens up about her process in relation to working in the series format. “I had many questions on how to map the inner journey of the character, but Ritchie Mehta, our director, always had the answers to all our questions. So I was like "wow, we do not have to take any strain in charting the character", as our director is so clear about what he wants from each of his performers and individual scenes. So in that sense it was complicated, but since the director was good, I got used to that process.”

Nimisha is also vocal about the freedom and liberation that the medium of a multiple-episode spanning show offers, over and above her work in films. “From an artistic point of view, it's so liberating to spend that sort of time with a character. We will need to know what happened before a particular scene so that we can maintain the emotional continuity for the present scene. So that was a little difficult. But in a way it’s so beautiful you know, since in cinema we only get two hours to establish our character graph right? But here we are shooting across four months. So we get to travel for four months as this one character. That’s an entirely different artistic kick.”

Watch the full interview here: