I Want to Be As Cool As Nassar Sir when I Grow Up: Faria Abdullah

Actress Faria Abdullah made her dream debut in Telugu cinema with the hit comedy Jathi Rathnalu (2021), in which she brought the house down as a naive lawyer. After appearing in Ravi Teja’s Ravanasura (2023), Faria is all set to feature in SonyLIV’s upcoming Hindi series, The Jengaburu Curse. In the Nila Madhab Panda directorial, she plays Priya Das, a Londoner who comes to India in search of her missing activist-father. As she tries to uncover the hidden truths, she gets caught amid Naxalite woes and political conspiracies. 

With over 800K followers on Instagram, the dancer-turned-actress tells us about choosing to act a small role in the commercial entertainer Ravanasura, the pressures that a good debut brings with it, the learnings she picked up during her theatre days and more.

Edited excerpts of the interview:

You started out as a dancer and influencer. When did you decide to become an actor? 

If I think about it now, it was never really a shift. Personally, there is no difference between any form of art. It is just expression at the end of the day. For instance, even while drawing, if you go down to the basics of it, you are flowing. I got trained in both dancing and theatre after my tenth grade; that’s where my stage training started. Acting has now moved from stage to screen.

How does your experience with theatre help with films?

I think it definitely gives you a certain sense of discipline and structure because you understand how to read and analyse script and characters. Otherwise, you might get lost in the “output” of cinema more than focusing on the process of it. It’s easy to think about the kind of effect your current action will have when it is being watched. But theatre is an active response space. So the experience helps you understand that it can’t be thought of in the future tense. It should be at this moment.

Let’s go back in time to speak about your big debut with Jathi Ratnalu. How was your mindset?

I put a lot of pressure and set high standards for myself. A good debut also meant that I can’t do anything that is less smart than Jathi Ratnalu. So I have done only fewer films. The downside of this is that people have not seen a lot of me. But I am okay with it. These self-imposed rules give me more opportunities to portray different characters in different films. I have got a certain understanding that I don’t want to do senseless content. Even if I experiment, it has to be a calculated risk.

Ravanasura was a commercial entertainer in which you had a very small role to play. But now you’re part of an OTT series where there is a lot of scope for your performance. How do you select your scripts?

I go with my gut instinct most of the time. I also understand that the markets are very different in each industry. If I had to take an OTT project down south, the story would be very different. It’s just my understanding because web shows have not really kickstarted at a major level in the south. There are a few good ones, but there is more space and scope for OTT in the north. As an actor, it is not a step down when you do a web series. Instead, it is the trend right now. 

That said, when you choose a project, it is not about being in the lead all the time. Sometimes, it is about who is leading the film. In Ravanasura, my high point was working with Ravi Teja sir. I have no regrets about it because I got to meet and understand him from that proximity and it really gave me a lot of exposure. I also had a dance sequence. It was probably 30-40 seconds but it stood out and the video went viral. So it didn’t really matter to me that I wasn’t the lead. I made the best out of whatever I was given. 

What is the one thing you’ve learned from Nassar from this series?

It was a life-changing experience working with the team of The Jengaburu Curse for close to four months. If you see Nassar sir, he is a kid at heart and it is very comfortable to speak to him. I wonder how a person who has done over 650 films has retained his humility and childlike innocence, and is still relevant to a young girl like me. He is really cool and I want to be like him when I grow up. When I am 65,  I want the young kids to look at me and go, “Wow, Faria ma’am is so cool.”