• Huma Qureshi has come a long way as an artist over the past three years, as anyone who has known her well enough would attest.
• The last three to four years of her ten years in Bollywood have had a bigger impact on her career development than the years before.
• Despite having a strong debut with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, she has just recently begun to realise her full potential as an artist.

Huma Qureshi has come a long way as an artist over the past three years, as anyone who has known her well enough would attest. The last three to four years of her ten years in Bollywood have had a bigger impact on her career development than the years before. Despite having a strong debut with Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, she has just recently begun to realise her full potential as an artist.

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Talk about this with Huma, who is now enjoying the positive press around her role in Maharani Season Two, by saying, “When I came to this city, and experienced an initial burst of success and recognition, I felt really great. My initial thought was to be able to do one film, which I did and it had worked well. I got more films as a result and I signed up for a few almost immediately. I didn’t have a plan, ki uske baad kya? No one had groomed me. I didn’t have those experiences or the right kind of people to guide me in this space. I was still figuring out who I was as a person and what it was that I liked to do. I was also getting swayed a lot by what people said at that time. It was an unnerving phase. In the last three-four years, I just became more self-aware and stopped caring for what people had to say. I started being myself more, I spelt out what I didn’t like. Of course, I was always respectful of people but I stopped being afraid of spelling out my thoughts. I pick the kind of work I want to do and the kind of people I want to surround myself with at work. That has helped me be myself even more. I stopped fitting myself into other people’s moulds. The more I became a clutter breaker the more people began to love it.”

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Talking about what her decade and more in Bollywood has taught her, Huma, who will be seen with Sonakshi Sinha in Double XL, in Tarla Dalal directed by Piyush Gupta and a few more projects, says, “The decade’s run here taught me to be authentic. Yes, this is showbiz but the more I have been authentic, the more life has rewarded me. When I say authentic, I mean being myself, picking my work and backing my own choices, walking my path and not measuring my success on other people’s benchmarks. The last three-four years put things into perspective for me. That perspective fuelled my thinking and I stopped myself from overthinking everything in life. When I came here, I didn’t know what I would do after doing one film; today, there’s a packed year ahead. It’s surreal and it is good not to plan. I want to work till my last breath, entertain, tell stories and continue being an actor. I want to leave behind a body of work that people revere for years to come. There’s no point in being the flavour of the season. It’s more fulfilling to create a credible body of work that speaks for itself, long after you’re gone.”