Any conversation with Sushmita Sen is a heartwarming experience. Her innate warmth, honesty and straightforward emotionality has always made Sushmita stand apart from her peers. There’s always been something about her.

After a gap of a few years, Sushmita, 44, returns to acting with Aarya. Directed by Neerja man Ram Madhvani, the nine-episode series, streaming on Disney+Hotstar from today, has Sushmita playing the title role, a woman who deep-dives into the murky world of the narcotics trade when her husband (played by Chandrachur Singh) is shot by a business rival.

The Telegraph chatted with Sushmita, ever warm and ever graceful, on being Aarya, what makes her ‘protect her peace’ and how she overcomes her ‘dark days’.

The trailer of Aarya, ever since it dropped in early June, has notched up 25 million views! That’s huge for a web series...

Those are just numbers, it’s the feedback that people have given that matters. People have taken the time to watch the trailer, write down messages and show their excitement in a way that just overwhelms me. Of course, the 25 million is great (laughs), but the fact that people have expressed how much they are waiting for it by watching the trailer so many times, the outpouring of love… I can’t express it. Immense gratitude is what I feel.

You must have been offered various projects across mediums through the years. What’s it about Aarya that made you say, ‘This is it!’

Everything about it, love (laughs). Aarya is a call made after 26 years of experience of making mistakes! (Laughs out loud) It’s a culmination of all that I have learned while making those mistakes. And one of the things I have realised is that you can have an author-backed role and a fantastic script and be inspired by amazing content… but if the people making it don’t match up, then ultimately, it’s a visual medium… what you see is what you get. So, the script and the fact that it was inspired by Penoza (a Dutch web series), which, if you have loved (The) Godfather… then imagine Michael Corleone as a woman.

But it’s not really that it drove me to jump with joy, even though the script was exciting. Meeting Ram (Madhvani) is what did it. When I met him and understood his creative vision, I knew that I was looking at Aarya even before it had been made. I could see it so clearly through him. Also, if I had to go on an OTT platform and it was for a mass and class combined audience, there couldn’t have been a better one than Disney+Hotstar, given the reach it has. So, this was the best platform, the best direction team, cast and crew and an amazing author-backed role. So there were too many reasons to say ‘Yes’.

Most actors ‘become’ a character. Ram Madhvani, in his interview to The Telegraph a few days ago, insisted that you didn’t become Aarya, you are Aarya. Would you agree?

I know why he says that. When Aarya was written on paper, there were many layers to the character… her arc was that of a vulnerable housewife gaining strength slowly. And then he cast me! (Laughs) So the ‘vulnerable housewife’ became ‘comfortably strong’ (laughs). It became a journey of gaining strength, growing that strength to coming back like a lioness. So the graph and the arc, everything changed the minute they cast me.

Most directors would be too attached to their own writing to make that change. But he changed it to the idea that, ‘Aarya has to be Sushmita’. He kept on making those changes on many levels.

For example, Aarya is a chess player in her head. To show that thought process in her head, Aarya, in the original script, was a swimmer… she would go for a swim to think things through. I showed up and said, ‘I can swim… I know how to swim… but the way I think is on gymnastic rings’. Nothing depicts one’s world being upside down than hanging on a gymnastic ring upside down. Ram jumped at it! In Aarya, we use gymnastic rings in various ways to depict the thought process of the character at that very moment. It’s not just the action of doing it… there’s a thought attached to that action. So yes, there’s a lot of me in Aarya on many levels. Ram’s right about that.

How much of your own strength and resilience did you have to tap into to play this woman who’s suddenly thrown in at the deep end?

I had to control the strength and resilience, actually! (Laughs out loud) No matter how close a character seems to be to the person playing it, there will always be a difference in the kind of choices you would make if, God forbid, you were thrown into that situation. So many a times I have had to underplay what I would otherwise do in real life.

How alive did you feel in front of the camera this time around? Did it feel any different?

I was very alive! I felt like a newcomer on set… the enthusiasm, raring to go…. I woke up excited every day. We shot non-stop, every location was a two-hour drive from home. But I woke up every morning disciplined, geared up to get on set….

Facing the camera was not a challenge… it’s always been a favourite thing to do… I love it. But the way Ram shoots his narrative is not something I was used to. Once I learnt that in the workshop… that there will be no ‘cut’ and we would have to keep on doing the take in one go… we will have to keep moving our mark, talk to one character and move to the next one and forget about the camera because the camera would capture what needed to be captured… it was like a live theatre performance being captured on camera. This was exciting as hell because if you aren’t a 100 per cent in the moment, you can’t pull off a take like that. Sometimes, a take would be 10 minutes long! Those 10 minutes later, we would cut, reset and go for 10 minutes again. It was emotionally quite exhausting and so in the ‘making’ video, you will see Vinod Rawat, our co-director, and showrunner Sandeep Modi making us dance to Chunari chunari (from Sushmita’s film Biwi No 1). There was too much intensity, but given a choice, I wouldn’t ever want to break the continuity of emotions again… I would want to shoot like this forever.

Are we now going to see much more of you on screen? Because we do want to see much more of you…

(Laughs) I am super excited! Finally, I have got the appetiser, entree, main and dessert on my menu, with options! (Laughs) I have been waiting for a time like this when I would have so many options and be able to tell myself, ‘I don’t know which one to go with!’ So much fabulous content… there are two in the pipeline, they are still in the draft stages. But for now, my attention is completely on Aarya because it represents everything that the actor in me wants to be known for. And I hope that when I move to the next one, you will tell me, ‘Oh my god, completely different… this is a new journey for you’. I hope that happens.

Given the life you have lived and the experiences you’ve had, what truly makes you happy now?

(Pauses) It’s very simple... happiness is not something that I put conditions on. I have realised more and more in the last six years that have gone by — with all the upheavals in my life — that happiness is condition-less. You have to choose it against all odds, and you have to choose it even if it means looking at your self sometimes in the mirror and faking a smile when you don’t feel like it at all. Smiling changes something… there’s a chemical change in your body and you learn to appreciate the fact that you may have this issue, that issue, financial problems, relationship-related ups and downs, but that you are alive. That, for me, is reason enough to be happy.

On the day Sushant Singh Rajput passed on, you put out an Instagram post saying. ‘Protect your peace’. Do you think that the key to ‘protecting your peace’, especially in the last few years, has been in dipping your toes in the business and holding yourself from plunging into it completely?

Nicely asked. You know, you can’t exist in this world and run away from your work, people or relationships… some that you like, some that you don’t like… it’s a mixed bag of everything. When I say, ‘Protect your peace’, it’s not about running away from your responsibilities, be that your job or your duties on a daily basis. The way to protect your peace, actually, is to be closer to yourself and to be closer to your conscience than to be dependent on the approval of the world at large. A lot of us wait for that applause and approval, a lot of us want that applause to survive and to grow…. I am human too… I love somebody saying, ‘Hey, well done! We are so proud of you!’ I feel happy hearing it. But my existence, happiness and my peace are not dependent on it. This I have learnt not while staying away from the industry or from acting… I learnt it very early on in my life. All it takes now is to constantly practise it… because on the days I forget it, I become a sob story instantly, I am a mess…. So, I have to gather myself and say, ‘No, no, no, no!’

It’s tough to imagine you being a mess…

Human beings, no matter how tough, are vulnerable. The idea that one is tough and strong is fantastic, that’s the aspect of me that the world is consuming. Can I be tough and strong? Sure I can. There is no denying that. But is that the only ‘me?’ Is that all I am made of? No, not true at all. The only reason that there is a strength that permeates itself is because there is weakness, there is pain. There is tremendous pain…. There is a dark side that allows the light to come through. We are all made of everything. I have dark days too.

I am a Sushmita Sen fan because... Tell t2@abp.in