Taapsee Pannu on building her brand equity in Bollywood: 'Want to be an actor of repeat value'

Taapsee Pannu has managed to make a statement with her film choices in a career which spans only six years. Her last outing in the courtroom thriller,  Badla , proved that she is one of the finest actors of her generation. In a recent interview with DNA, Taapsee opened up about her brand equity, her upcoming projects and what repeating directors means to her. She begins by pointing out the fact that actresses nowadays do not have any categorisation. “Earlier, actresses were easily classified as commercial or off-beat heroines. However today, it takes a while to tag someone. And that’s what I had always wanted for myself,” she adds. She insists that the only criteria for her to take up a project is if she would like to watch the film as an audience. And this is also one of the main reasons she has taken the “middle path” (as she calls it), between ‘commercial’ and ‘art-house’ cinema. [caption id=“attachment_4330419” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] Actress Taapsee Pannu/Image from Twitter.[/caption] Now that directors like Anurag Kashyap, David Dhawan, Shoojit Sircar, Anubhav Sinha and Neeraj Pandey want to work with Taapsee, the actress feels she has succeeded in her ‘parent-teacher meeting.’ “I want to be an actor of repeat value. I’m keen to work with my directors again and again because I had an amazing time doing films with them," says Pannu. And indeed, Taapsee does get to feature in more than one project for most of the filmmakers that she has collaborated with. Dhawan, who introduced her with Chashme Baddoor (2013), signed her for his big-budget money-spinner  Judwaa 2 in 2017. Shoojit took her in both his films —  Running Shaadi (2017) and  Pink . The latter launched the actress into the big leagues, once critics and directors took notice of her performance in the film. Taapsee has also worked on two of Neeraj Pandey’s projects. The first was in a short film titled Baby in 2015, while the other was Naam Shabana in 2017. The actress attributes her credibility to the fact that she forms bonds with her directors. “I must have done something good for them to come to me again. I feel comfortable with them. David sir is my local guardian here because he calls me every few weeks to check on me and see if I’m fine. Anurag is like a buddy and I can discuss anything with him. With these people, I can sit and have conversations, which doesn’t have to be about films,” she explains.