Exclusive! Adrushya will be my first Marathi release and kicks off a good 2022 for me: Manjari Fadnnis

Earlier this week, Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na actress Manjari Fadnnis revealed the poster of her first-ever Marathi film, Adrushya. Slated to release in theatres on May 13, the film, directed by Kabir Lal, is the remake of the Spanish thriller Julia’s Eyes. “Kabir sir had procured the remake rights of the film in four languages, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu. While I play the lead in the Marathi version, Rituparna Sengupta is in the Bengali one and Gayatri Shankar and Esha Chawala star in the Tamil and Telugu versions. Julia’s Eyes is a thriller love story and right now we have only revealed a poster. Once the trailer comes out it will give audiences a better idea of what the film is all about. Kabir sir is one of the top-most cinematographers in the country and he makes his directorial debut with the four versions of Julia’s Eyes. The Marathi and Bengali versions were shot simultaneously. This is officially my first Marathi remake. I was supposed to do a couple of other Marathi films earlier, but they did not get made. I am very excited about this film because it gave me a lot of scope to perform and is quite different from the work I have done earlier,” says the actress.

Besides this theatrical release, Manjari is also gearing up for a few direct-to-OTT project releases. “My tryst with OTT began in 2019 with Barot House, a thriller that I am really proud to have been a part of. I was paired with Amit Sadh in the film that released on Zee5. It did really well for all of us involved with it. The OTT space has been so amazing; it’s been a blessing for the entire industry. Barot House was done when the OTT scene was just picking up and some interesting content was being produced for these platforms. The film was an eye-opener for the industry about good cinema coming directly on OTT platforms. It worked beautifully for me and this year, I am expecting a lot of releases,” she says.

For starters, the actress has a comedy thriller web series for MX Player with Rajeev Khandelwal. “There’s another family drama thriller series that I have done for Disney+Hotstar, which is directed by Mihir Desai (of Mirzapur fame). There’s a lockdown feature I did with one of my favourite directors, Aarti Bagdi, with whom I had done an earlier award-wining short-film called Khamaka. Aarti’s film Chalti Rahe Zindagi started off with the idea of a short film, which was then developed into an anthology revolving around three different families and what they are going through during the lockdown. There is another lockdown film called Yeh Dooriyan, which I did with Paresh Pahuja. This is an interesting film that we shot ourselves, in the sense that the director and cinematographer were on Zoom calls with us and told us how to capture the scenes. This should come out as a four-part web series soon. So, a lot of exciting stuff is happening,” she says, adding, “I just hope people like my work.”