Parvathy Dubs for Kareena Kapoor Khan in ‘Daayra’: ‘That One Crack in the Voice Was the Most Difficult’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Dubbing another actor’s performance comes with a very different set of skills and challenges than dubbing for one's own performance. Parvathy, who has lent her voice for Kareena Kapoor Khan's character in the Malayalam version of “Daayra,” says the process was centered on respecting the original performance rather than attempting to recreate it. Speaking exclusively to Variety India, she opens up about interacting with director Meghna Gulzar at length, the most challenging scene in the movie and the science of dubbing for another actor.

“The idea is to be true to the actor's performance,” Parvathy quips, adding that the actor has already made the character what it needs to be. “The job is not just to translate but to bring out the soul of that performance in another language. It is very different from performing the role yourself because the choices made by the primary actor have to be completely respected. And that's the one thing that was my North Star. I tried to maintain the integrity of Kareena's performance,” she shares.

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Dubbing for Kareena was no easy feat. Parvathy did not approach the dubbing as an exercise in mimicry. “Kareena has an extremely distinct and recognizable voice and screen presence. But without even trying, some of the English dialogues that I delivered were eerily similar to Kareena’s voice. Both Shankar Ramakrishnan, the Malayalam writer who oversaw the dubbing process and I, were wondering. If I practice enough, I might be a good mimic. Jokes aside, I feel like I didn't try to imitate her voice. I tried to mirror the decibels and intonations and then let everything else just fall into place. The more I listened to her, the more my voice would subconsciously try to track the timbre, tenor and pacing,” she explains.

The technical demands of dubbing extended beyond voice modulation. Getting the emotion and rhythm right while ensuring that the Malayalam dialogue sat naturally needed practice. She reasons, “The biggest challenge in all of that was controlling the mouth and the lip sync to make sure the other language doesn't look too jarring. The beginning of the mouth movement and the ending of the mouth movement should look the same. The shape of the mouth should also look the same, which is a very strange element to keep focusing on while performing.”

While she did not speak to Kapoor Khan directly about the dubbing, she did have an extensive conversation with director Meghna Gulzar about the film and its central character. “I spoke to Meghna at length about the movie and the character. She gave me a very nice introduction to why she made the movie the way she did. She spoke a lot more about Ajooni, which was a fantastic initiation for me,” she shares.

There was one particular moment in “Daayra” that proved especially difficult to reproduce. Thiruvothu recalls, “There is a scene where Ajooni is listening to a person recount an incident. At the end of it, she basically closes out the line of questioning. While doing so, she has to say a line that suggests that this is the end of questioning and her voice cracks in the most delicious way. What Kareena has done, only a sync sound could catch. It is mind-blowing. That one crack in the voice was the most difficult. I did not achieve it to the extent that Kareena has done it. You can't recreate it, but I hope that I have done justice to it.”

She is also moving into a very different space with her upcoming Malayalam film “Prathama Drishtya Kuttakkar,” which translates to “Prima Facie Guilty.” She plays a constable and, for the first time in a Malayalam film, appears as a fully uniformed police officer. She quips, “It is not a typical crime investigation or a police thriller story. It is much more about the human side and the flawed side of what our officers have gone through and do go through. That excited me because, for the longest time, I have been playing characters which are, in some way or the other, on the right side of the story. They do the right thing. Everything gets into a murky zone here. That was very exciting, especially as a law-abiding officer.”