Freida Pinto on Looking Beyond Hollywood for Roles: ‘I Would Love to Work With Nadine Labaki’

variety.com:

John Bleasdale Guest Contributor Freida Pinto took a break from her jury duties at the Red Sea Film Festival to talk to Variety about her career and her hopes for the future.

The Indian actor shot to world fame for her starring role in Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) and remains committed to the breadth of cinema. “I’ve always looked at cinema globally,” she tells Variety. “After ‘Slumdog,’ I could have easily played all the Indian roles, the girlfriends and sidekicks, or just gone and done something only in India.” Instead, she sought out challenging roles, often playing non-Indian characters such as Iranian or Arab women, for example a Palestinian girl in “Miral,” a choice that she recognizes is now controversial. “I know it’s not okay these days, because the world has opened up and there’s so much talent,” Pinto says. “But — and I don’t mean this in a pompous way — with a film like ‘Miral,’ where I’m playing a Palestinian girl and it’s such a controversial subject matter, they needed someone then who could put butts on seats.

I now see that’s why they chose me, but at the time I thought: I can see myself as x, y and z, and I feel that in me too. The way I think now is not the way I thought back then, at all.

But those films opened doors and made people more aware of a whole region, which has so much talent and so many stories that are not being told frequently enough.