Roles with the punches: Wknd interviews actor Mona Singh

She entered the scene with the Hindi television show Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahi (2003-06), an adaptation of the wildly popular Colombian telenovela Yo Soy Betty, la fea (1999-2001), hidden behind thick glasses, braces and unflattering outfits.

Playing the defiantly unglamorous Jassi, Singh took on the role of a character who used grit, wit and grace to navigate the unforgiving fashion industry – mirroring her own instinctive command over her craft.

The network eventually went on to pull off one of the biggest promotional coups of all time by withholding Jassi’s real persona from the public eye until much later, a move that cemented the actor as impossible to ignore, and even harder to forget.

Singh says the show also helped her find her own voice. “For me, Jassi was also all heart. And that is when I realised that the audience will follow you if they believe in you and your art,” she says.

Twenty-three years later, Singh, now 44, is still listening to her heart, driven by the instincts that keep her from being stereotyped into roles — like that of an older woman or mother — that are so often the laziest boxes women in the industry are pushed into.

Interestingly, some of her most notable performances have been in big-ticket projects where she plays a mother, such as in Laal Singh Chaddha (2022), a Hindi adaptation of Forrest Gump, in which she plays the mother of Aamir Khan, who is 16 years older. In the TV series Made in Heaven season 2 (2023), she plays the sharp Bulbul Jauhari — again a mother, this time a firm yet empathetic one — to an errant teenager.

Even in Aryan Khan’s 2025 directorial debut, The B***ds of Bollywood and her recent breakout role in Kohrra season 2, her winning streak curiously continues to revolve around the theme of motherhood, explored in its varying shades, textures and nuances.

Yet that is what defines her characters the least.

“I am that actor who does not care about looking good on screen,” she says. “I’d really rather look the character, play the character, because there’s some beauty in showing the fatigue, sweat and silences of the kind of people I play.”

The popularity of streaming platforms has allowed writers to craft layered, more nuanced roles for older women, she says, of characters who were once relegated to the background, often with unspoken “expiry dates” imposed upon them as soon as they crossed their mid-30s. “Now, they get to be more raw, unfiltered and rooted,” she says.

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What has held Singh in good stead for over two decades is her appetite for taking risks without “thinking too much about whether a role will box [me] into a category,” she says. Moving away from television, a medium she was incredibly comfortable with and starting over in grittier, more realistic spaces of films and streaming shows was a big leap of faith. It required her to strip away everything she knew and reinvent herself, she says.

She is open to delving into the depths of her craft by playing oddballs. She plays a formidable gangster in Vir Das’s directorial debut Happy Patel: Khatarnak Jasoos released earlier this year, where her character, even though not a mother in the conventional sense, is called Mama — the queenpin of a criminal nexus. In the upcoming action-drama film Subedaar, she plays a ruthless leader of a sand-mining empire.

With Mama, just like with Jassi, there was the risk of falling into the trap of caricatures. To avoid reducing her into a cliched, tattooed mafioso, she stuck to what she had learned very early on in her career: keep the drama restrained and the performance real, no matter the size of the screen.

This commitment is evident in her “most difficult, yet fulfilling” role, too. Playing Dhanwant Kaur in Kohrra Season 2, a grieving mother and gritty cop, she admits, was very far from her own cheerful personality. “Delving into that emotional depth and staying in that headspace was a huge challenge, but the love the show received made every difficult day on set worth it.”

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Growing up in a military household, the daughter of a colonel in the Indian Army and an architect, she spent much of her childhood on the move, meeting new people, adapting to new environments, a skill that serves her well on set. The arts graduate with no film lineage or formal film school training, taught herself that acting is a “physical and emotional discipline — a muscle one needs to train and flex like an athlete.” It’s why she is drawn to playing characters who are uncomfortable, unlikable, who reflect ‘life’ — whether it’s in the form of a mother, a wife or a cop.

In the age of aggressive hypermasculinity, Singh’s characters display an almost reticent resolve. “When the narrative today is about loud characters, I think power lies in restraint, and authority lies in being quiet. It’s about carrying that weight with resilience, which we, as women, know so well to do as multitaskers, when all our tabs are open at the same time.”

She’s done her share of glamorous roles in TV shows such as Kya Huaa Tera Vaada (2012-2013), Pyaar Ko Ho Jaane Do (2015-2016), as well as web and reality shows.

“I think now the audience is ready to sit with me in the dark with Kohrra and Border 2. That’s the kind of trust I have built with them by constantly learning, unlearning, and most importantly, taking risks and reinventing through the years.”

The trick to getting this far is never getting complacent. “I’d stay up at night wondering how I would play a character as layered and complex as Dhanwant Kaur,” Singh says.

“I think that fear is good. Overconfidence is what kills.”