We would wait to watch Pankaj Kapur and Naseeruddin Shah perform: Dia Mirza on new show

Mumbai, Aug 22 (PTI) Actor Dia Mirza says she ensured she was on the sets of Anubhav Sinha's “IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack” when veterans Pankaj Kapur and Naseeruddin Shah were doing their scenes as she didn't want to miss the opportunity to observe her favourite actors.

The Netflix drama is based on the infamous hijacking of an Indian Airlines Airbus while it was headed to New Delhi from Nepal on 24 December 1999. It had 188 passengers on board. It is the longest aviation hijacking in the history of India.

"As a director, he has managed to pull off a cast like this. The gravitas that this story will carry with it is because of the grace that these individuals bring to the story. When he was getting into the shoot with Pankaj ji, Naseer sahab, we would wait there even when the set-up was getting ready, we would go there to just watch how they would be before the shoot.

"For me, it was like, ‘I’m not missing this opportunity for anything in the world’. To see them onscreen is one thing, and to watch them perform is going to be a different experience. I wanted to see these stalwarts in a room do their work,” Mirza said in a media interaction.

The show boasts of talented ensemble which also include Vijay Varma, Patralekha, Arvind Swamy, Kumud Mishra, Manoj Pahwa, Dibyendu Bhattacharya, Pooja Gor, Kanwaljit Singh, Aditya Srivastava, Sushant Singh, Yashpal Sharma Amrita Puri, and Anupam Tripathi.

The actor said when the hijack happened in 1999, she was participating in the Miss India pageant.

"I was 17-year-old when the incident happened. I had come to Mumbai for the training programme for Miss India pageant. During training programme, they prepare you with general knowledge questions, I had the habit of reading the newspaper...

"I remember I was terrified and feeling great amount of empathy and pain for those going through it... There were so many passengers. It lasted for seven days and every minute you felt, ‘What will happen now?’ But nobody understood what was happening.”

In “IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack” Mirza plays news editor Shalini Chandra, who she defines as an intelligent and powerful woman.

The actor said she wanted to understand the challenges and triumphs faced by women journalists and editors at the time when TV was just making its presence felt.

“I asked Anubhav ‘How many women were newspaper editors?’ I was interested in those aspects. A journalist friend of mine said she was the news anchor at that time and she was nine months pregnant and she had to go to the studio to record. She said, ‘I didn’t have the courage to express that it is hard to be there at 5:00 am for a pregnant woman, I did that day after day to do the job because if I made an excuse I would’ve been perceived as not good enough’.

According to the actor, the power that women in media had was among very few, and they were doing the job like a man. They didn’t have the space to perform the duty as women.

“IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack” is slated to stream from August 29.