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Indian-British actress Anya Chalotra has been courting the limelight over the past few weeks as the female protagonist Yennefer in the Netflix series The Witcher. She appears alongside Superman actor Henry Cavill in the fantasy action series.
The 24-year-old's father is of Indian descent while her mother is English.
Anya was eight when she realised how much she loves the limelight, and in an interesting way the incident has an Indian connection.
"We were having a family get-together and I was told to sing an Indian song," she told vogue.in. "And I knew, at that very moment, that I loved the attention."
Less than a year and a half into the profession, Anya is already thrilling the small-screen circuit.
She made her debut with the British series Wanderlust in September 2018 and her second show - the BBC thriller The ABC Murders - followed in December. It took her less than a year after that to arrive in American showbiz.
The Witcher premiered on Dec 20 last year. A second season of the show has already been announced for a 2021 release.
"I haven't read all The Witcher novels," Anya admitted, adding that she is a slow reader.
"That's only because I am very thorough. I read every detail and often have to go back to the page before and read it again, and I ask questions as I go along, since I am that character."
She trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She has performed in three professional plays.
The Witcher's script, written by producer and showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, turned into Anya's Bible.
"I would read it every day, again and again. It allowed me to become more familiar with the way Yennefer (character) would think, breathe and respond to the relationships she had with different characters," the actress said.
When Anya walked into the audition room, she knew nothing about monster slayers or her character, Yennefer.
"I walked into this blindly. And I think that helped me because had I known of Yennefer being such an iconic character and having a huge fan base, I would've over-thought every choice I made in that audition room," she said.
She auditioned three times for the role. "Every time I auditioned, I became hungrier for the role," she said.
Anya "started getting a lot of attention" after she bagged the role, "which was both negative and positive".
So, she got off social media. "I wanted my journey to be very different. I wanted to allow the character to evolve organically, without any pressure, and I know that the only way to do that was to shut off my social media," she said.
Being Yennefer in The Witcher, she admits, has been a life-changing experience. "This opportunity has changed my life. It has been an absolute gift," she said.
The Witcher is based on the fantasy series of novels and short stories of the same name by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.
Indo-Asian News Service
