Prime Video’s Call Me Bae not only marks the series debut of Ananya Panday, but also the first time that she plays a comedic role.
The Hindi-language series follows Bae (played by Panday), a heiress whose luxurious life quickly becomes upended. She then goes on a journey in Mumbai to carve out a new life for herself, finding work as a journalist.
Panday knew she wanted to be part of Call Me Bae from the get-go. “When I got the script, I read all eight episodes in one night,” Panday told Deadline. “I completely binged on the script and knew that I had to be a part of this because I love the journey with the character. She starts from a certain point and then ends up in a completely different place, but the core of her stays the same. It’s very easy to put a character like this in a box and stereotype her as a ditzy girl or an airhead, but there was so much humanity in her and I loved the challenge of bringing that out.”
Panday said that another exciting part of Call Me Bae was taking on her first comedic role. “I’ve been part of comedy films before where the other actors are producing the comedy, and I’m just someone who is reacting to it,” Panday said. “But with this show, I got to explore my comic timing and physical comedy, which I’ve never done before. It was also one of my biggest challenges. When you’re shooting a comedy, you really don’t know if the joke is landing because everyone on set has already heard the jokes before, so not everyone’s laughing. You have to kind of measure it yourself, like — is this funny? Is this not funny?”
Call Me Bae also stars Vir Das, Gurfateh Pirzada, Varun Sood, Vihaan Samat, Muskkaan Jaferi, Niharika Lyra Dutt, Lisa Mishra, and Mini Mathur.
While the cast did not have much time together before the shoot, Panday said that this ended up having a positive impact on their performances. “When we came on set, everything we were doing, we were also naturally reacting to each other. Keeping things spontaneous and improvising helped a lot.”
After six years acting in films like Kho Gaye Hum Kahan and Dream Girl 2, Panday said that there are many other genres she would like to try acting in, to grow in her craft. “I haven’t explored horror, and have also never played a real-life character or done a biopic. I’ve never had to study a real person, which would be so much fun and so fascinating,” Panday added.
Call Me Bae is written by Ishita Moitra, Samina Motlekar and Rohit Nair, with Karan Johar, Apoorva Mehta and Somen Mishra onboard as executive producers for Dharmatic Entertainment.
