Let's admit it, Slumdog Millionaire was a pretty ridiculous story, in its own charming way. But even more improbable was the way the movie's fairytale spilled over into real life. Just as Danny Boyle's underdog characters overcame impossible odds, won the big prize and lived happily ever after, so the film itself followed suit, coming from nowhere to scoop up the Oscars and every other award going, and forging a real-life relationship between its wide-eyed co-stars, Dev Patel and Freida Pinto. It was the perfect happy ending to the story, but Patel and Pinto, then aged 19 and 25 respectively, were just starting out on their movie careers. What happens after the happily ever after?
"I had no idea what I was doing back then," Pinto laughs, looking back on her tumultuous initiation. "I wouldn't say it was a scary experience – sometimes ignorance is bliss – just walking straight into it, not knowing what the future held for me. But it did feel like an illusion that was going to shatter once the big hoo-hah about Oscars and Baftas was over. I pretty much thought that was it."
It wasn't, as evidenced by the fact that she's here in the same Soho hotel where she held those first interviews three years ago, but her survival was by no means guaranteed. You'd imagine Pinto had the world at her command: young, well-grounded, highly photogenic, with one foot in each of the world's biggest movie industries. But female actors from "minority groups" rarely survive in international cinema, let alone Hollywood, for long, she says. You can see why, looking at some of her post-Slumdog movies. There's a sense that nobody has really known what to do with her. More often than not, she's served as passive eye-candy for the camera to gawp at. She was an off-the-shelf muse, for example, in Woody Allen's You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, and she has variously played a supportive girlfriend (Rise of the Planet Of the Apes), a Greek priestess (Immortals) and a mythical Arab princess (current oil epic Black Gold). She has also stayed away from the Indian film industry, more of which later.
Now, though, Pinto has found another film that fits her. Trishna is a modern reinterpretation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, directed by Michael Winterbottom with a light-footed, semi-improvised, verité style. The story is trimmed down considerably from Hardy's novel: Pinto's Rajasthani villager catches the eye of a passing British-born Indian man Riz Ahmed, who recruits her as both a lover and an employee at his father's luxury hotel. The story translates remarkably well to modern-day India, where the divides between conservative rural values and progressive urban ones, and between social classes, are still pronounced. Trishna is Pinto's most demanding role to date. She is in practically every scene, but like Hardy's Tess, she's an opaque and at times infuriatingly meek presence who spends much of the film simply responding. Another passive beauty, you could say. Trishna's passivity infuriated Pinto herself. "There were times when Michael would ask me to not respond, and I found that extremely difficult," she says, laughing. "My instinct is to fight, but as Trishna I had to swallow that back. I just had to be like, [through gritted her teeth] 'OK, she doesn't say anything now. She just keeps quiet. She's not liking this but she's just keeping quiet.'"
She must get that a lot. She had a similar experience with director Tarsem Singh on Immortals, which she made straight after. Amid an orgy of rippling muscles, clashing weaponry and effects-enhanced combat scenes, she was the compliant priestess, the film's only "romantic" interest – at least in heterosexual terms. "I really wanted to do some action. I asked Tarsem so many times, I probably irritated him: 'Come on. Let the girl do something – let her not just be quiet.' I guess she's not a warrior, she's an oracle priestess, so she's kind of subdued."
At least with Trishna, Pinto gets to play an actual Indian person, in India, for the first time since Slumdog Millionaire. Yet it's a side of India she had never really experienced. She grew up in Mumbai in a relatively wealthy and worldly family. Her mother was a teacher, her father a bank manager. She turned down acting and modelling offers until she finished university, and travelled across Asia presenting a glossy English-language travel show on Indian satellite TV before surviving a six-month audition process to land her Slumdog role. So playing an uneducated Rajasthani peasant was only slightly less alien than a mythical Greek priestess. She had to embed herself with the local family who play her own in the movie, learn the local dialect, even how to milk cows and goats.
"Having grown up in Bombay, from the day you're born, you have absolute freedom to choose who you want to be," she says. "But I do have cousins and family spread all over, and listening to other people's stories you realise it's not far removed from reality. It does still exist." There's an extra dimension to Winterbottom's retelling in that Riz Ahmed's character (a combination of the novel's two key men, Alec and Angel) is a British-born Indian. He sees Trishna as the romantic embodiment of his homeland but their relationship ultimately becomes almost colonial in its power relations. "In the beginning, it's Trishna's purity that really attracts him, but it's that very purity he ends up exploiting," says Pinto. That British-Asian tendency to romanticise the homeland is something she has often experienced, spending time in London, she says.
Is she talking about her boyfriend? Dev Patel, after all, grew up in Rayners Lane, north-west London, and had barely been to India before shooting Slumdog Millionaire. "I guess so. He said to me, 'Mumbai is you', because he's seen it through my eyes. I've shown him Mumbai the way I think it is. So you automatically make that connection, between a person and a place."
She and Patel are still an item. His career, it has to be said, has been less stellar than hers. His last significant movie was M Night Shyamalan's ill-fated The Last Airbender – a fantasy action epic that was almost unanimously panned. At the moment, he's also to be found in geriatric Britcom The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which he plays young hotel manager in the picturesque "movie" Rajasthan of Jaipur, rather than the unassuming village Rajasthan captured in Trishna.
For Pinto, the next step is surely a Bollywood role, I suggest. One of the other things her character does in Trishna is train to be a movie dancer – which, of course, involved taking lessons in real life.
"I would be lying if I said I wasn't looking for films in Indian cinema, but the genre I was looking for was different," she says, citing the less commercial type of 1980s Indian cinema she grew up on, before the term "Bollywood" was even coined – Naseeruddin Shah's Mirch Masala, for example. "Very based in reality, very gritty, almost devoid of glitz and glamour. That kind of cinema really gets me." Ironically, the only place she has found it so far is in British-made films. "But I wouldn't rule out Bollywood one bit. I'm just not sure I could fit the bill."
In what way?
"I don't know. I feel like it's a completely different ball game, being able to be so … I don't know, larger than life. I feel … timid."
It's not just modesty. Pinto might be one of the most famous Indian actors in the world, but in terms of the Indian film industry, she's not up there with domestic screen goddesses such as Kareena Kapoor or Aishwarya Rai. The Indian media are often ambivalent about Pinto, speculating about her wealth, mocking her fluctuating accents in both English and Hindi, the way she still calls Mumbai "Bombay", even complaining that her skin is too dark for Bollywood. Last year, conversely, the British press accused her of artificially lightening it in a cosmetics advert. "It's kind of weird but at the same time, I don't think there's a situation of malice there," she says. "They're just very curious about how, when, why. Yes I do have an accent. I've never denied it. They like to create a drama, to pit one person against another, and it's absolutely not required."
Pinto's lack of fixed identity seems to be unsettling. As much as she's negotiating the western-eastern cinema divide, she also seems caught between an indie-mainstream one. She's successfully alternated between edgier fare and big-budget blockbusters so far, but what with her role as a "brand ambassador" for L'Oréal, and her current occupation of the babe-shaped gap in this month's Esquire with "her sexiest photoshoot ever", you wonder whether she'll ultimately come down on one side or the other, or whether the world can simply accept her as a global type of celebrity. When I ask her where she actually lives these days, she replies "British Airways". Technically, she mostly divides her time between London, Mumbai and Los Angeles. Does she ever wonder where she really fits in?
"No, not at all! I like being the outsider in a way, everywhere I go. I know I'm from India and I fit in there completely, but I like looking at things from the outside. I don't want to be fitted in somewhere. I fit into the world. I'm a human being before anything else."
