It’s all in the sparks.
Growing up, having a celebrity crush was inevitable. You’d be lying if you didn’t admit to the fact that animated conversations with a poster of beautiful women Rekha or Sridevi was part of your routine as a kid. Even on a school night. You grew up and grew out of the crush phase and got yourself into real relationships where the women were a version of your crushes, even if it’s in the slightest of ways. However, it must dawn on you some that what did Rekha and Sridevi have that only few women in Bollywood have?
Bollywood has its fair share of South Indian-origin actresses. Sure there’s Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor and Jacqueline Fernandes. But, speaking strictly in terms of where women like Sridevi, Hema Malini, Rekha, Deepika Padukone, Shilpa Shetty, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and more come from, notice how the on-screen chemistry with each of these women are always on fire. Before even coming into Bollywood, regional film industry had seen these personalities wow the audiences down South.
Movies like Sadma, Mr. India, and Chandni had Sridevi romance men such as Rishi Kapoor, Kamal Hasan and Anil Kapoor (in no particular order). Heck, even in English Vinglish, she had sparks flying with her French-speaking co-actor Mehdi Nebbou.w Shilpa Shetty had many commercially successful movies like Badhai Ho Badhai, Baazigar, Jung and Insaaf. Her success as an actress can be credited to the fact that sparks would fly on screen between her and her co-actors.
Present day Bollywood maybe much more diverse by including people with different backgrounds like Katrina Kaif, Jacqueline Fernandes and Nargis Fakhri, but there’s something about actresses like Deepika Padukone that’s made her one of the few women with the most chemistry with her co-stars today. She has had her share of insane amount of sparks with everyone from Shah Rukh Khan to Farhan Akhtar to Irrfan Khan to Vin Diesel to now Shahid Kapoor in Padmavati. It’s like a switch that’s always turned on.
The key to having great chemistry with people is probably to be comfortable and maybe that’s exactly what Deepika and Sridevi have employed as one of their skills. Most South Indian women are in fact some of the most forward thinking and comfortable group of people to be around. This can only mean that other folks possibly need to have better social skills so that their on screen chemistry game can give South Indian women a run for their money.
