Black is the new white

With films like Gone Girl and Mean Girls shining in the box office, it’s not news that women have taken centre stage in cinema worldwide. Now, they don’t flinch about filling the shoes of an antagonist either. With Priyanka Chopra excelling overseas and confirming her ‘negative’ role in Baywatch with Dwayne ‘Rock’ Johnson and Zac Effron, we see that it’s the strength of the character more than anything else that has these ladies taking to the roles with gusto.

According to Priyanka, the role of the meanie Victoria in Baywatch was initially written for a man. “But after the director met me, they thought I would be better as a villain and then they changed the character to a female,” Priyanka told the Press Trust of India over the phone from Montreal, Canada. But for the actress who has dabbled in negative characters in Aitraaz and 7 Khoon Maaf, it’ll probably be a piece of cake.

Versatility is another reason actresses tend to embrace complex roles of antagonists. For instance, Angry Indian Goddesses Tannishtha Chatterjee recently took on a negative role in the web series Alisha and this was only because she believed that she was often typecast as an actress who could only portray positive roles. Nefariousness isn’t new to Indian actresses – whether it was Urmila Matondkar in Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, Kajol in Gupt, Tabu in Maqbool, Vidya Balan in Ishqiya, Katrina Kaif in Race, Konkana Sen Sharma in Ek Thi Daayan or Ramya Krishnan in Padayappa. And Hollywood didn’t let down on this trend either.

If news is to be believed, Charlize Theron’s gritty performance in the multiple Oscar-nominated Mad Max: Fury Road has inspired the director of Fast and Furious 8, F. Gary and his screenwriter Chris Morgan to insert a fierce female villain into their story. No prizes for guessing – this role too, is rumoured to go to Theron. “The audiences are changing and they aren’t all about straightjacket films anymore,” director Saad Khan, states. “I’d like to think of these characters as having a grey shade to them. For actors, it’s a test to challenge themselves and rise to the occasion.”