Actress Rani Mukerji will return as a teacher with her next film, Hichki.

After her 2014 release Mardaani, Rani chose a film that deals with Tourette’s syndrome, as she believes “the role was challenging and the story is that of an underdog”.

Tourette’s syndrome starts in childhood. It involves uncontrollable repetitive movements or unwanted sounds, such as repeatedly blinking, shrugging shoulders or blurting out offensive words. “I used to stammer when I was a child. My mother and brother also do. My mother is a singer since she was 13, and what’s surprising is that she doesn’t stammer when she sings,” said the Mardaani actress.

On the mindset of people towards a married actress, Rani said: “Time’s changing. In the west, there has never been such discrimination. They don’t have any hichki (hiccup). Here we do have that hichki and it’ll go away if we work on it. The hichki is in everybody’s mindset. If you watch a film without tagging an actress as ‘married or a mother’, you will see the character the actress is playing.”

Rani said though Yash Raj Films is producing Hichki, she didn’t really discuss the film with husband Aditya Chopra. She said: “Aditya was less involved compared to Maneesh Sharma as a creative producer. I interacted more with Siddharth (Malhotra, the director) and Maneesh.”