When Dimple Kapadia was ‘locked up in a make-up van’ to read Christopher Nolan’s Tenet’s script

Actor Dimple Kapadia turns 65 on Wednesday. Let’s look back at the time when she talked about her experience of working with filmmaker Christopher Nolan for Tenet. During an old interview, Dimple had said that Christopher, who is very secretive about his films’ scripts revealed it to her inside a locked-up make-up van. Also Read: When Rajesh Khanna ‘sternly’ scolded Dimple Kapadia for giving advice: ‘Ab tum mujhe sikhaogi?’

Christopher Nolan, best known for his high concept, big-budget movies such as The Dark Knight series, The Prestige, Inception, and Interstellar, generated a lot of buzz with his decision to cast Dimple in the 2020 film, which was partially shot in Mumbai.

During a 2020 interview with iambirmingham.co.uk, when Dimple was asked how Christopher showed her the script, she said, “I was locked up in a make-up van and it took me about 4 hours to read it. For the first 50 pages, I didn’t know what the hell was happening, not that I got to know very much in the rest of it but I read a lot, yet I could not understand what was happening. Then I saw my dialogue and they were like, so long, so long that I had a heart attack, and I can’t remember lines.”

She added, “So what I did was a cheeky thing and I took my phone and I clicked just my dialogue, you know, and when Andy Thomson [Associate Producer] came I gave him the script and I said ‘Listen, I’ve taken shots of my dialogue’ and he said ‘You can’t do that’. So I said ‘You have to give it to me because I did not remember anything’. I said ‘I’m being honest with you and telling you that I need this, without this I can’t deliver really, really long, long lines’ and thank God I had that with me and I could work because the whole shoot is in, like, a single shot. He got the whole scene in a single shot so it was literally a speech.”

Tenet, the Warner Bros espionage-thriller featured John David Washington in the lead alongside Dimple, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh, Aaron Taylor Johnson, and Clemence Poesy. In the film, Dimple played the role of Priya, an arms dealer from India.

Dimple started her journey in the movies as a teenager with the late Rishi Kapoor in 1973’s Bobby. She went on to feature in many movies such as Kaash (1987), Drishti (1990), Lekin (1991), Rudaali (1993), Gardish (1993) Krantiveer (1994), Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Leela (2002), Phir Kabhi (2008), Tum Milo Toh Sahi (2010) and What the Fish (2013). She also featured in Being Cyrus (2006), Luck by Chance (2009), Dabangg (2010), Cocktail (2012), Finding Fanny (2014) and many more.