Homi Adajania on casting Dimple Kapadia in all his projects, “If I did a project without her, it would feel incomplete”

By Rajiv Vijayakar -

March 7, 2024 - 1:57 PM IST

This association is unsung, not celebrated in the way Shakti Samanta-Sharmila Tagore, Nasir Husain-Asha Parekh, Raj Kapoor-Nargis, Sanjay Leela Bhansali-Deepika Padukone or Yash Chopra-Raakhee and others were.

Homi Adajania on casting Dimple Kapadia in all his projects, “If I did a project without her, it would feel incomplete”

Director Homi Adajania, one of Hindi cinema’s quirkiest directors, who his regular producer, Dinesh Vijan, calls a “crazy filmmaker”, and Dimple Kapadia, whose histrionic excellence is a byword, are a pair that has, with due respect to the others, exhibited greater and spellbinding variety of both their films and Dimple’s performances that they have presented together.

In Being Cyrus (a promiscuous Parsi woman), Cocktail (Saif Ali Khan’s mother), Finding Fanny (a middle-aged Christian lady with a prosthetic posterior!), Angrezi Medium (Kareena Kapoor Khan’s mom in a cameo), the web series, Saas Bahu Aur Flamingo (as a ruthless village head who also is a businesswoman) and now Murder Mubarak, Dimple has been an inseparable part of Homi’s oeuvre.

We chat about this unique collaboration with Homi himself.

All your films as director—and your web series too!—have had Dimple Kapadia. So how do you see Dimple as an actress, as the variety in the roles she has done with you is phenomenal, ditto your films?
Thanks for your generous words. I enjoy the privilege of Dimple’s trust as an actor. We share a similar madness, though I often have to reel her in before she goes nuts with her already off-the-wall characters. There’s something unique about the way she approaches each role as if it’s her first. And it’s this vulnerability that makes her rock-solid in her craft. I think she’s fantastic as an actor, but even more so, as a human being.

How did you first met Dimple and how has your rapport grown in time over 20 years?
The first time I walked into her house was to offer her the role of a manipulative mad hatter in Being Cyrus. I remember she was screaming the choicest abuses at her treadmill! I knew at that moment that I had found my character. She didn’t care to explain her behaviour to me, but I soon realized that Dimple was babysitting Twinkle’s dog, who had pooped under the treadmill and was hiding there. Yup, that’s pretty much what my first impression of Dimple Kapadia was—beautifully chaotic and unapologetic about it. We are good friends now, which I guess is the result of our working relationship where a large amount of trust and belief in each other has been shared over so many years.

And now, do you ensure that she fits a role that is designed for her, or does it all happen organically?
At first, it was a coincidence that she was in my second film, then she made it to the third, and so on and so forth, but now it’s not a choice anymore! Apart from the abuse I would have to endure, I genuinely feel that if I did a project without Dimple Kapadia in it, it would feel incomplete!

Also Read: “Sara Ali Khan has a lot of Saif Ali Khan’s wittiness,” says Murder Mubarak director Homi Adajania