It is half past six on a Sunday evening in early March when Angana Roy walks into Art Cafe (near Lake Market), winsome in white. One floor above the cafe, Angana flits in and out of the TV as part of the latest edition of the Star Jalsha Parivaar Awards, where she is a performer and a winner. While a family upstairs is waiting for Angana to appear on screen, the 25-year-old actress is waiting for a table downstairs. Ten minutes turn into 15, but Angana is unperturbed. Not least because she has managed to catch a break (for a day) for the first time in 2024. As the female face of the popular Bengali serial, Tumi Ashey Pashey Thakle (daily telecast on Star Jalsha at 8pm; available to stream on Disney+ Hotstar), Angana has been shooting daily for 14 hours.
“I wake up around 6am every day. My shift starts at 7am, which used to be 8am during winter. Lunch is at 2pm and it’s almost 9pm by the time we pack up. Then I head to the gym, come back home, have dinner and crash,” says Angana, mildly amused that anybody would be interested in knowing her routine. Since episodes for Bengali soaps are shot only a day or two before they are aired, the pressure is relentless. But Angana, who grew up on a diet of Hindi serials, has no complaints: “I always knew that I wanted to do at least one serial, and I was biding my time for the right one. I chose Tumi Ashey Pashey Thakle because the premise of the show appealed to me. And also because I really wanted to do a love story.” When the show began last November, Angana was playing Paro, a happy-go-lucky aspiring detective who also happens to be a ghost. Lately, Angana has taken to essaying Parvati, a village girl who is hurled into an unfamiliar environment with only her resilience as a counter to her misfortune.
‘Gaining recognition isn’t the same thing as being a great actor’
Angana as Paro in ‘Tumi Ashey Pashey Thakle’
Photograph courtesy: Disney+ HotstarJuggling two roles day in and day out is hard enough, but add to it the vastly different looks of the characters as well as their voices and mannerisms and Angana has her task cut out. “It takes me a long time to go from Paro to Parvati and even longer the other way around. Parvati is the first time I’ve played a character who comes from a rural setting. That meant changing my accent, tone and general way of being,” shares Angana, who also has to mask her tattoo everytime she steps into the shoes of Parvati.
“It’s something very close to my heart,” says Angana, sotto voce, while describing the treble clef and the three birds that adorn her left hand. The treble clef denotes the love of music that Angana shares with her mother and maternal grandmother, but also doubles up as the ‘B’ in ‘Believe’. For Angana, who regards “my faith to be my grandmother”, the ink is a reminder to “believe in myself”, something she struggled with when her grandmother passed away in 2016. The aerial view of the three birds stands for Angana and her maternal grandparents, with whom she spent a lot of her formative years in Asansol.
Being a regular face on TV has lent Angana considerable visibility, to use the industry lingo. She enjoys a burgeoning following on her Instagram page (which she still manages herself), with several fan accounts dedicated to counting down the days to her birthday, among other things. “Recognition makes one relevant, which matters in terms of casting (especially in the Bengali industry where auditions are not always the norm). But gaining recognition isn’t the same thing as being a great actor,” explains Angana. Having debuted as a five-year-old in Tarun Majumdar’s Alo (2003), Angana always saw acting as her calling, even though she went on to complete her education as an engineer before returning to the limelight in 2018. A musical thriller, Shei Je Holud Pakhi (2018), was the web series where Angana was first seen as an adult, before proceeding to star in a bunch of shows that allowed her to expand her acting arsenal. Srikanto (2022), where Angana plays the younger version of Rajlokkhi, catapulted her to OTT fame, leading her to receive an offer from one of the biggest names in South Indian cinema, which she had to turn down “because it was impossible to learn a new language in less than a week!”
From Kamalini in ‘Pariah’ to Shivangi in ‘Lukochuri’
Many of Angana’s initial forays into OTT bracketed her as someone with a doe-eyed innocence, not unlike the trope that one of her idols, Anne Hathaway, was subject to during her early years in Hollywood. This had more to do with unimaginative writing than anything intrinsic to Angana’s acting persona. “Most female roles are just defined by a few adjectives — nice, naive, friendly and all that. In such cases, I create a backstory for the characters in my head,” says Angana. For her big screen debut in Pariah (opposite Vikram Chatterjee), which released in February to largely positive reviews, Angana was cast in what seems like another so-called ‘innocent’ character. But Kamalini, as Angana elaborates, is much more: “Tathagata Mukherjee (the director of Pariah) is someone with a meticulous vision. He thought of Kamalini as the eyes and the ears through which the viewer understands Pariah. Kamalini is supposed to be the moral anchor of the plot, a sort of conscience keeper.”
Based on the illicit business of abusing and killing street dogs in Kolkata for their meat, Pariah is a film with more moments than stories. And in the moments that stand out, Angana is unmissable. “I was told that my eyes speak a lot, and that can’t be the case for Kamalini, as she starts off as ignorant about the world she inhabits,” recalls Angana, who improvised her own touches to the character, such as blinking rapidly during the first half of the film, when Kamalini is still blissfully unaware of much of the malice that surrounds her. While the testosterone-fuelled action sequences in Pariah are a rarity for Bengali screens, Angana’s assured performance provides the film with a much-needed emotional footing. Kamalini’s transformation from an unsuspecting volunteer at an NGO to the catalyst behind the exposure of serial crime makes for a compelling arc, with potential additions in store in the sequel (no timeline has been decided yet).
Hot on the heels of Pariah’s success, Angana plays Shivangi in her second theatrical release, Lukochuri (out on March 22). “I love how the story has turned out. We shot the film in nine days and there’s a lot of scenes in the mountains, which I really enjoyed… Lukochuri is loosely based on Sairat (a 2016 Marathi romance directed by Nagraj Manjule) and my character is about an ambitious but spoiled girl who wants to break free,” says Angana. Breaking free is also something that defines arguably Angana’s most memorable OTT performance till date, as Godhuli in Noshtoneer, a Tagore classic adapted into a #MeToo drama. Much like her name, Godhuli has multiple shades — unapologetic yet compromised, sprightly yet traumatised. “I tried to relate to the character without endorsing what she does,” says Angana, careful “not to judge a character when I’m playing her”. To better understand Godhuli’s state of mind — she acquires suicidal tendencies after realising that her partner, who also has a wife, has abandoned her — Angana listened to numerous true crime podcasts alongside resuming her readings on psychology.
Working with Subhashree Ganguly and Radhika Apte
To get into the skin of Sanchari in Indubala Bhaater Hotel, another of her dynamic OTT portrayals, Angana created a playlist that Sanchari would like and listened to it religiously. “Sanchari is an apparently simple character whose layers unravel as the show progresses. The director of Indubala, Debaloy Bhattacharya, has a gift for creating the most aesthetically amazing sets. That was one of the highlights for me, as, of course, was working with Subhashree di,” reveals Angana. While Subhashree Ganguly forms the heart and soul of Indubala as an immigrant woman whose cooking shapes her identity, Angana is the trigger for the show’s climax. Sanchari’s seemingly casual take on belonging builds into an epiphany for Indubala, offering one of the most beautifully understated endings to a Bengali show in recent memory.
With a versatile portfolio of work distinguishing her already, what are Angana’s plans for the future? Does she believe that she has well and truly arrived? “Can anyone truly arrive in this industry?” she asks, half joking. “I’m an empath whose biggest ambition is constant growth. I don’t believe in measuring myself against what others are doing, because everyone has their own journeys. Going forward, I’d like to delve into the Hindi industry without giving up on opportunities back home in Bengali,” outlines Angana, who shot an ad for the Premier League with Ranveer Singh a few years ago and played a cameo as an undercover agent in Mrs Undercover (2023), starring Radhika Apte. “I cherished my time on set with Radhika Apte. She’s the consummate professional, a no-nonsense actress who’s extremely spontaneous.”
‘The world is full of possibilities and I’m excited to explore them’
Angana feels that she is now in a position to be ‘more selective about my choices’
Image courtesy: Angana RoyAngana regards spontaneity as one of her biggest strengths, which shines through refreshingly even outside her body of work. On her Instagram stories, she shares more poetry than selfies. On chat shows, she is candid enough to talk about her personal life (including doing a stand-up comedy act on it!), never bristling at the prospect of becoming fodder for gossip. Even though her serial commitments have taken away her time with herself, she is happy to acknowledge that TV has made her better technically, “improving my understanding of lights, sound and the camera”.
As she speaks, Angana grows momentarily wistful of all the “deep and important scenes” she shot across projects that never made it to the final cut. Such things are supposed to be rites of passage for actors, and yet their frequency can be disheartening. For Angana, it is one more reality check to be taken on the chin, perhaps made easier by the fact that the past year has put her in a position to be “more selective about my choices”.
It is these choices that will shape the next leg of Angana’s quest for “constant growth”, a phase where she will have to locate herself on the increasingly widening spectrum between actress and star. “The world is full of possibilities and I’m excited to explore them,” smiles Angana, right before she leaves Art Cafe and rides off in her car. On the floor above, Angana is still on TV, about to start her next performance.
