Dia Mirza on OTT boom: We are just beginning to explore its potential

Dia Mirza has dabbled with the OTT platforms both as an actor and as a producer, and she admits that the medium has been fulfilling in more ways than one.

“I have done Kaafir and produced Mind the Malhotras for OTT platforms. As an actor and producer ,who has been in the industry for over two decades, this new medium has excited, challenged and inspired me to discover new facets of storytelling and even of performance craft. This is a vast, limitless horizon and we are just beginning to explore its potential,” she tells us.

The actor-producer also feels the creative freedom that digital platforms offer is refreshing.

“We work with a limited time and narrative space in cinema, and that imposes certain constraints and limitations upon what we can do with a character and a story. Whereas on OTT platforms, you get the freedom to nuance, detail and layer a theme in multiple ways and to add hitherto unexplored dimensions to characters,” Mirza points.

Stating that the medium is tremendously exciting, she adds, “There’s now a great potential to not just tell the kinds of stories I really want to tell, but also to create without the pressure of appeasing the box office.”

Even in terms of opportunities, the 39-year-old feels that the web has a better scope for actors, and she shares that some of her favourite performances over the last few years have been by actors in OTT shows.

“We wouldn’t have discovered just how brilliant they are if they had been restricted to cinema. In my own context, I can say that the character of Kainaaz in Kaafir wouldn’t have come my way in cinema. Working in long format allowed me to immerse myself in the detailing of my character and brought me so much satisfaction as a performer,” she notes, adding that OTT stories have so much space for diverse narratives “for women to play complex and richly layered protagonists. There is a certain creative freedom too which I hope will continue to exist in this space.” MSN