Amrit Kaur on playing two roles in The Queen of My Dreams
As a huge fan of The Sex Lives of College Girls and the character Bela Malhotra in particular, I was thrilled to speak with Amrit Kaur earlier this week about her new film, The Queen of My Dreams.
In Fawzia Mirza‘s drama, Amrit plays not one but two roles – Azra, a Pakistani-Canadian living in Toronto in 1999, and the younger version of her mother Mariam in Karachi in 1969. Azra flies to Pakistan to be reunited with her family after the death of her father and the trip forces her to confront her strained relationship with her mother.
During our chat, Amrit spoke about switching between both characters, working with her longtime friend Hamza Haq and speaking in Urdu. Here’s that conversation:
I got the sense from your Instagram posts that filming this meant a great deal to you. What made the experience so special?
Many things – I got to work with Hamza Haq, who was my first acting partner at my acting class and now, six and a half years later, full circle, I’m doing my first film with him. That was phenomenal. Getting to shoot it in Pakistan – I don’t know when I would have gone or had the opportunity to go to Pakistan – that was huge, and then so much life work that the film pushed me to do; looking at my sexuality, looking at my relationship with my mother, looking at my relationship with the motherland.
It must have been the dream as an actor to have two roles to play within the same film, especially ones that are so different, from two different time periods.
Yes, I am a huge show-off and ambitious and I loved the aspect of showing off (laughs).
Who did you prefer playing?
I preferred playing Azra, only because I had more difficulty with Mariam.
Can you go into those difficulties a bit more?
It’s more noble to show the vulnerability of losing a father. To access that, even though I thought it would be harder, it was easier for me than to reveal the pettiness of being a spoiled princess daughter who wants everything her way and will throw her mother under the bus to get her way. That was harder because it’s more flawed and unnoble. It’s all true, you know, it’s human, so right after that my acting coach was like, ‘We still have to work on this.’ I worked on Miss Julie, it’s a play (with) a similar character who’s spoiled and rich. I’m working towards both of those but I have more difficulty in showing the pettiness in myself so (I have) more to do there.
Did you switch between the two during filming or did you do all of Azra and then all of young Mariam?
We switched in any given day, sometimes multiple times. I had techniques of snapping into one person versus the other. For Mariam, a lot of actors do this technique called animal work, which is embodying the physicality of an animal that reflects the character, and I was working on a Marwari horse. For Azra, I worked on the embodiment of a person and as a person whose body I felt and so morphing my body into that person who I felt walked, talked like Azra. So those were the physical things that helped me get into each character.
Were you able to speak Urdu before or did you have to learn it for this role?
I had to learn it. I speak Punjabi which I would say is 60% similar but there’s a different fluidity in Urdu and 40% of the words are different, probably more… We were speaking contemporary Urdu, but the classic Urdu would have been even more difficult.
That must have been quite nerve-wracking speaking another language in a movie. Did you feel a sense of pressure to get it right?
I felt a lot of pressure to get it right and I’m not sure I did. What’s interesting was that I spent so much effort in getting the Urdu right that that wasn’t the thing… in ADR, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the Urdu, what we spent time on was my accent in English. That’s interesting because even in a place like Karachi there’s so many people that have different upbringings and different education that affect the accent. Even as Mariam, my mother and father have very different accents; my father has more British-inspired, and so I had to make a choice about where my accent landed and how much British influence I had etc. Some people think I have too much British influence, some people are like, ‘Ah yes, my parents speak like that,’ so that was the grey zone.
I loved your dancing scenes. What was your favourite one between the fantasy Bollywood dance and your comedic one at the wedding?
I mean I had more fun in the comedic one because it was so silly but I’ve always had a dream of doing a Bollywood sequence so it was fun to do that with Hamza. But I wish we had done more Bharatanatyam (classical Indian dance), I had spent a lot of time studying Bharatanatyam for the film but we didn’t use as much of that.
Do you have to do a lot of choreography rehearsals for those?
I did private classes for Bharatanatyam because it wasn’t entirely set how much Bharatanatyam we would do. At the end, we ended up doing less. But the other choreography, yes, but not too many. We had a couple of rehearsals each.
Had you seen Fawzia’s short film or play before the script came to you for the movie?
Yes, the script didn’t come to me necessarily, I auditioned for it. Yes, I did see the short film.
And what was it about the story that spoke to you?
So many things; the fantasy of filming in Pakistan, of course, getting to play two characters, speaking Urdu, that was a big deal. I also, when I first auditioned for the part, Fawzia asked me what connects me to the character and one of the films that made me want to become an actor was Fire by Deepa Mehta and seeing two gay women that were of South Asian descent on film was empowering and I wanted to be a part of a film that could maybe do that for someone else.
The Queen of My Dreams (see review) is a contender in the First Feature Competition at the 2023 London Film Festival.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.