Kriti Sanon, who played SIFRA (Super Intelligent Female Robot Automation) in her latest comedy Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya (2024), opened up about her process of playing a robot on Film Companion’s Front Row. For most of the film, SIFRA is “so perfect and she’s so correct, and the way she walks is really perfect,” said Sanon. “Even if she opens the door, she will open it in a rhythm. Her blink is almost in a rhythm. Her turns are not jerky.” According to Sanon, what made this ‘robotic’ behaviour even more difficult was her co-star. “I had Shahid Kapoor in front of me, who’s a fabulous actor, and you feel like flowing, you know? If the other person does an improv, you feel like doing something too. And I couldn’t, I felt so tied.”
Sanon joked about how Kapoor would get annoyed because she would constantly say, “I wish I could do more.” She added, “I felt almost weirdly suffocated in [SIFRA]’s body,” talking about how she could not use her hands or blink the way she wanted to during her performance. Finally, it was the climax, in which SIFRA malfunctions spectacularly and threatens to set the city on fire, that Sanon felt alive. “I felt like a khula sand (loose bull), who could just do whatever she wanted. Nobody will question, why am I doing what I’m doing. I am malfunctioning. That’s it. I can do what the hell I want,” she said.
Sanon also spoke about the inputs she gave for that climactic scene: “On the script, actually, they had written, ‘She talks fast and she talks slow,’ but that was it. My idea was that if she’s malfunctioning, let’s go all out, [do] everything that can go wrong. And we added these body twitches randomly. Her getting stuck also was a thing that we added. It became much fuller and it just felt liberating. And I remember when I was shooting the climax sequence, I was like, ‘Now I’m feeling like I’m shooting a film. Now I’m really feeling fully alive.’”
The scene also included Sanon dancing sensuously to the iconic song “Dhak Dhak Karne Laga” from Beta (1992). “The ‘Dhak Dhak’ portion was my favourite because I’ve been a die-hard Madhuri [Dixit] fan,” said Sanon, who shared that she wanted the fan on full-blast in cold Jaisalmer just so that her hair could fly in the same way as the original. “That was my moment,” she said with a laugh.