_For the Anurag Kashyap-backed Little Thomas, Rasika Duggal worked with a dialect coach from Goa to perfect her accent and get rid off the strong Mirzapur hangover_
Imagine Rasika Duggal’s fiery survivor Beena Tripathi from Mirzapur speaking in a Goan accent? That was the happy confusion the actor found herself dealing with as she shot for two diverse projects, the third installment of the gritty crime drama series and her upcoming Goa-set children’s film Little Thomas, co-starring Gulshan Devaiah.
In the recently announced film, produced by Anurag Kashyap, Rasika plays Jessie Miranda, mother to seven-year-old Thomas. While filming for the Kaushal Oza directorial, Rasika had to juggle the shoot alongside the world of Mirzapur on some days. The actor says that although the two worlds couldn’t be more different from each other, “surprisingly, I enjoyed juggling a crime action thriller and a dramedy. I guess one was a relief from the other.”
Rasika, known for her impactful, deeply-lived-in performances, trained with a dialect coach to perfect her Goan accent. Sometimes, when the Mirzapur shoot and the Little Thomas schedule would intersect, Rasika contended with the switch in accents – a strong North Indian Hindi accent for Mirzapur, and the Goan accent for Little Thomas.
“The switch in accents was the confusing bit but also an interesting challenge. For instance, I had to improvise a few lines while shooting my final scene in Mirzapur. But, by then, I was so immersed in Little Thomas that the Goan accent kept surfacing! I had to consciously switch off from that part, and move on to the Mirzapur accent,” she recalls.
Filmmaker Kaushal Oza shares that Rasika was very particular about perfecting her accent for the role but was initially “afraid” as to how she would pull off the diverse accents of Mirzapur and Little Thomas, seamlessly.
“Rasika was really afraid as she had to pick up the Goan accent for the role. She was very particular about it, so we brought in a very good dialect coach, Bhupesh Bandikar, who is from Goa. Gulshan also worked with him but Rasika worked extremely hard on her accent especially because she had to come from the Mirzapur shoot and then do this!
“It wasn’t just that she grew up in North India so she was speaking in a certain way, but also because the Mirzapur accent was imprinted in her mind all the more because she shot for it for months. So she had to break out of it. But it was quite a commendable transition,” he adds.
The adorable film, also starring Gulshan Devaiah and child artiste Hridansh Parekh, revolves around the adventures of Thomas. Set in the ’90s in Goa, the film follows Thomas, the only child of his parents (played by Devaiah and Duggal), who desperately wants a little brother. He realises that the only way to get a baby brother is to unite his quarreling parents, so he takes it upon himself to get them to kiss!
Little Thomas is set to have its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne and is produced by Luminoso Pictures, Civic Studios, Flip Films and Good Bad Films.
