Our latest Hollywood export: Deepika Padukone to feature in a segment of 'XXX' with Vin Diesel

After a slew of Bollywood actors venturing into Hollywood, we now have Deepika Padukone joining the bandwagon. Firstpost has confirmed from a source linked to the actress, that Deepika Padukone is indeed on for the next installment of the XXX franchise with the superstar Vin Diesel helming the hijinks. [caption id=“attachment_2535972” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Deepika Padukone posing in an image posted on social media. Instagram deepikapadukone[/caption] The source confirmed to Firstpost that Deepika’s viral photo with Diesel on Instagram, was not photo-shopped. The source said, “We heard some Deepika starlet from Bollywood was doing the new XXX with Vin.” That’s about all Bollywood amounts to in Hollywood lexicon. And never mind Priyanka Chopra. Her “success” is restricted to a couple of wannabe-Lady Gaga songs that are hardly chartbusters in the US. Quantico, the series where she plays one of the leads, is not an indication of how or how much Hollywood accepts Bollywood. Why is Deepika so excited about the project with Diesel? The gleeful secrecy and stealth with which she announced her presence in the film indicated a momentous cinematic collaboration, like Meryl Streep coming together with Shekhar Kapoor to do ‘Bandit Like Beckham’ (patent pending).

For all we know, Deepika may be nothing but a prop in XXX. It’s happened before. Hark back to Anil Kapoor’s laughable cameo in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol or more recently Ali Fazal’s blink-and-miss part with Vin Diesel in Furious 7. Fazal’s appearance was so minuscule that it was outright stupid of him to go to town about the part. But then he got what he wanted in his country. Media attention. We’re so firang-fixated, we worship any sign of acceptance in cinema abroad. Let’s hope Deepika gets a better deal from Diesel than Fazal. Also, let’s hope she is not given some peculiar sing-song way of speaking her lines just to sound Oriental. If you’ve seen Dev Patel speaking in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, you’d probably want to rap Peter Sellers on the knuckles for showing the way (in the classic comedy film The Party) to how Indians speak in Hollywood films. Refreshingly, non-Indian television seems far more welcoming than Hollywood of Indian actors who do not speak in a sing-song voice. I saw Priyanka in the American series Quantico and Shabana Azmi in the British series Capital, and both spoke English without a put-on accent. Hopefully when she walks into Diesel’s domain, Deepika will remember she is currently the Queen of Hindi cinema. How would it look for Mastani to be standing behind the Hollywood hulk speaking a form of Angrezi that requires subtitles to be comprehensible? Here’s wishing Deepika the very best on her new Hollywood venture.