Madhuri Dixit on ‘90s heroes still playing ‘lover boys’: ‘I cannot blame the heroes’

On bagging great roles, first in Netflix’s The Fame Game and now Amazon Prime Video’s Maja Ma, Madhuri Dixit said, “I’ve been working throughout with Total Dhamaal, Kalank. Then The Fame Game happened and I felt I got a very good role to play. It had good depth. There were so many emotions. She’s a star, a mother, a wife. So, I am fortunate I’m getting these many roles. I’m enjoying it.”

Madhuri spoke about how her role in Maja Ma is different from her maiden OTT project. She said, “The character I play in Maja Ma is not similar to the one I played in The Fame Game. There she came with a lot of baggage because she is a big star. She is a mother and has a family, but she also had a career, so nobody could take her for granted. But with this character in Maja Ma, she is the perfect mother, wife and she is very well known in her community and looked up at. She is not a professional. She is a very ‘every day’ kind of relatable woman. It is her story.”

Madhuri Dixit then opened up about choosing roles that tell stories about women. She said, “It is about women empowerment and I love to do roles like that. If you see Raja, Mrityudand, Anjaam, it has always been that way. I’ve been inclined to doing roles with an essence.”

Madhuri further said that the advent of OTT has led to female actors getting good work in their forties. “I’ve played a mother earlier too. But then I think they didn’t know what to do with women in this age group. Because of OTT and the kind of stories that are being told, there are no commercial constraints to make the film a hit. Of course, commercial films are changing as well. Look at films like Badhaai Ho, where a woman is the protagonist. She was not like a 16-year-old girl running around trees. Stories are maturing, the audience is maturing, and storytelling is maturing. People are consuming better content. There are so many stories about women that are being made. Hence so many good roles for female actors,” she said.

Madhuri Dixit also opened up about how ‘90s heroines are doing more evolved roles than their male counterparts, the heroes of the ‘90s.

She said, “It is always the case na. Women mature more than men (chuckles). You have to go to your higher intelligence and think about it. I cannot blame the heroes also because the kind of commercial films that are made, they need to do song, dance and all. So, they are always looking for something that keeps them young, which is not bad.”

“As a woman, I think what I am doing or Juhi is doing or Raveena is doing or anyone of us is doing is wonderful because we are going forward in life and we are true to ourselves on screen as well,” Madhuri concluded.

Maja Ma will stream on Amazon Prime Video from October 7.