Why actor Tillotama Shome refuses to cower to the film industry

A mainstay of the independent cinema circuit for decades, after her debut in Monsoon Wedding, the actor is now flexing her muscles to dominate the small screen, intent on carving her niche on her own terms

Tillotama Shome wishes she’d known “that headshots are a waste of time” when she was starting out as an actor. Headshots: An actor’s calling card. Their first screen test, first meeting with a casting director, first impressions. Vital currency in the entertainment business, but not in Shome’s experience.

“This was the first photo shoot of my life ever,” the actor wrote in an Instagram post in 2021, alongside a photo of her in a pink top and low-slung jeans; eyes rimmed with kohl, staring daggers at the camera. She had already made her big-screen debut in Mira Nair’s groundbreaking Monsoon Wedding (2001), playing the maidservant Alice to moving, earnest near-perfection. 

“I came with prints of this photo and two other[s] to Bombay,” Shome wrote. “They could not place Alice from Monsoon Wedding and this girl. ‘It was confusing’. So I left Bombay and went off to study and came back when folks were a bit less confused.” 

This unusual observation fits right into the extraordinary path that Shome has charted for herself in Indian cinema. A mainstay of the independent cinema circuit for decades, after that delectable debut in Monsoon Wedding, Shome is now in the hottest period of her career yet, flexing her considerable actorly muscles to dominate the small screen. More so than ever before, she is intent on carving her niche on her own terms.  

Quite the accidental actor, Shome, an Air Force kid, joined the theatre group at Lady Sri Ram College in Delhi University, mostly to practise her Hindi and deal with her stammer. It’s where she got noticed by casting director Dilip Shankar. He brought her in to audition with Mira Nair and writer Sabrina Dhawan. Nair has said that she cast her on the spot because “she was like an incredible dewdrop, and had the grace, the delight, and the pride of Alice.”

Shome’s own version of the story, as she has recited in past interviews, involves her accepting the part with an ulterior motive: She wanted to go to New York University to study drama therapy. She did, in 2004, learning process drama under a master of the form, Chris Vine, and then worked in domestic violence shelters and prisons, using what she learned to help survivors and inmates heal.      

Cinema beckons

In 2008, she moved to Mumbai to give the movie business a serious go. Over the next decade, Shome worked the independent circuit, in films both feature-length and short, in Hindi, English, Bengali. Her appearances—in films like Dibakar Banerjee’s critically-acclaimed Shanghai, Q’s avant-grade Tasher Desh, Italo Spinelli’s adaptation of a story by Mahasweta Devi, Gangor, or Konkona Sen Sharma’s excellent directorial debut A Death in the Gunj—may have been brief but never forgettable or easy to shake off.

Others, like Anup Singh’s Qissa and Rohena Gera’s Sir gave Shome the space to fully inhabit dense characters and demonstrate the intensity and versatility that were swiftly becoming hallmarks of her oeuvre. She played a woman who was raised as a man in the former, and a maid servant who is caught between ethics, her dreams and a strange forbidden love with her employer in the latter. She performed her chunkiest roles with the same nuance, depth, and realism as more petite ones. 

Awards and accolades followed, but didn’t change much on the ground. “I survived 20 years doing independent cinema and leading a very spartan life,” says Shome. “I entered the industry with hope, dreams, ideals, ideas fueled by my debut in Monsoon Wedding. As life went on and work was few and far between, I felt the full force of cynicism, anger, disappointment, mediocrity.”

Not wanting to give up

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, whose aftereffects we all continue to grapple with on personal and professional levels, even as the world tries hard to right itself on its axis. “The real boom was my mother’s battle with cancer in a general hospital in the midst of it,” adds Shome, alluding to a particularly challenging chapter in her life. “I had to finally return to hope. But this time around, the hope was not innocent, it was hard fought for. It was not mere wishful thinking.” 

“I made the effort to seek out people who displayed qualities that I admired, that made living and dying joyous. My focus was beyond the industry. I was building my Noah’s Ark,” she says with a tiny, sad smile; shades of the sentimentality that colours her candid, raw Instagram posts apparent through this conversation. “That is when the industry took notice of me. Strange, is it not?”

The industry, it would seem, nearly broke down her door. In the last 10 months alone, Shome has occupied more screen time and acreage in the pop culture chatterverse than years preceding it. “It is a new wave of momentum in my career indeed,” she says, crediting the emergence of OTT platforms, being in her forties and caring less about what others think of her, for it. 

Why OTT was game-changing

But those who have known Shome’s work will also notice a shift in the kind of characters she’s choosing to pour herself into now. Be it Delhi Crime’s unhinged Karishma, The Night Manager’s razor-sharp but cheerful Lipika, or Tooth Pari’s elegant courtesan Meera, the women she’s now playing are a touch more complex, more human, more powerful—or knowing how to extract that power—than those that came before. 

What is Shome looking for in the scripts she likes these days? “The feeling one is left with after reading a script becomes the compass,” she explains. “That has not changed a bit. If the script has anything I find problematic, I politely ask the director to explain the scene. More often than not, a director’s approach to answering the question is very revelatory. I do enjoy working with writer-directors, as their control over the material is very reassuring.” 

“The writers that emerged in the OTT boom are the real changemakers,” says Shome, deflecting praise to her collaborators as usual. “We have more women-driven scripts than earlier, but we [still] have a long way to go. The diversity in storytelling, as writers from various backgrounds joined the film industry, changed the game for actors like me.” 

Not settling for anything less

The game is made more intriguing because the “rule book” has been incinerated. The “shelf-life-of-an-actress” rule, for one. Shome, like her Delhi Crime co-star Shefali Shah, is in high demand as an actress in her forties. The “stars-get-paid-better” rule, for another. “A significant milestone has been the need to fight for my money,” says Shome. “If I don’t get what I feel I deserve, I will walk away from something, even if it is creatively satisfying. I have to do this, because for two decades, I worked for so little, while other stakeholders made their houses and cars. I don't regret not having these things, but I won’t feed this weakness in the system anymore.” 

Then there’s the “male gaze” rule. “I was very touched by the fact that some viewers wanted me on The Night Manager’s poster,” says Shome, of the mini-outrage online earlier this year, when the poster of the show’s first part portrayed its two male leads, Anil Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur alongside Sobhita Dhulipala, leaving Shome out (the poster for the original British series featured both female leads Olivia Coleman and Elizabeth Debicki.) 

“It made me feel seen. I was overwhelmed. And thanks to the viewers, I am on the poster of the second part of The Night Manager,” says Shome. “I think we must refrain from pitching women against each other in general. Please note, forces in power: The hot body has a brain and the hot brain lives in a body. Let’s celebrate the complexity of all kinds of women. Marketing-wise, it makes sense. The audience is teaching us something.” 

The next few weeks promise to be hotter than most for Shome, with that promised second part of The Night Manager, and a sequel to the hit Netflix anthology Lust Stories also set for a June release. Of her character in Lust Stories 2, Shome says somewhat cryptically: “She is caught in a wormhole of desire and guilt as she does something that she knows she should not be doing. She comes from privilege and that can bail her out, but what about how she feels about herself?” 

But even as she builds a bonfire out of a spark, Shome is already moving in new directions. “I am learning the ropes of being a producer,” she says. “This industry has given me a lot and I would like to understand it more, and hopefully create work environments that are more equal.” 

“I want to be a better human than an actor,” Shome continues. “I want to spend more time with elders and nature—both teach me how to be gracious. My creative process is directly intertwined with my ability to engage with others. My life shrinks, and my creativity dries up, when I am just worried about myself.” 

In all that she does now, she is informed by something the late actor Irrfan Khan once said to her. “'Don’t be a tragedy queen. No one likes to work with a person who is bitter and sad.’ Irrfan said this to me many times in many different ways,” says Shome. “I thought he just did not understand my pain of not having work. But oh, he did. And it is priceless.” 

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