For nearly three decades, Sheeba Chadha has been cast as the mother the aunt, the sister. Not that it bothers her. Within that narrow frame, she has built a subversive and quietly powerful career. In her last release, Bait, starring Riz Ahmed, she once again played a mother — Tahira, a Pakistani immigrant who loves and curses her son in the same intense breath.
Within Limits
“Have I been typecast? 100 per cent,” Chadha tells The Hollywood Reporter India, “Most of these roles being offered to me are of the mother or the bua (aunt). You have to accept that framework. Within that, though, the playing field has become more fertile and nuanced. Par framework vahi hai, yaar (But that’s the framework).”
It’s within these constraints that Chadha has crafted a niche, quietly formidable career — one where even brief appearances reshape entire scenes. She is no Farida Jalal-style stock mother figure, to be clear. Even when she plays a parent, no two performances feel alike, and rarely do they offer easy, sentimental comfort or the cliched succour of the maternal figure. Her characters provoke, disrupt and stir the plot.
Consider the spaced-out, reluctant performance of an ultimately accepting mother in Badhaai Do (2022). Then, there is Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet (2025), a modern-day retelling set in London. “My character is still a mother, but she happens to be Gertrude, and Hamlet happens to be Riz Ahmed; about that I am very happy,” Chadha notes. Without realising it, almost inadvertently, she has rewritten the script of what the on-screen mother can be.
Against the Frame
Chadha moved from Delhi’s theatre circuit to Mumbai’s cinepolis in the late 1990s. “I told myself I would try it out for a month, because it was so intimidating, trying out a new career, new city,” she recalls. Within that first month, she bagged a role in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999) as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s sister, followed by a quick aside in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998), where she also stood-in for Manisha Koirala when she was not available. Chadha also had a role in Ramesh Sippy’s Gaatha (1997-98).
She spent the following years mostly pursuing theatre, alongside films — from Desdemona in Roysten Abel’s Othello in Black and White (1999) to Rajat Kapoor’s C for Clown (2007), Atul Kumar’s The Blue Mug (2010), and also appearing as the eponymous Hedda Gabler in Henrik Ibsen’s classic the same year.
When asked about the broad sweep of her career, she notes, “There was no roadmap. See, earlier, there weren’t roles for actors like us in cinema. There was the four-pillar concept: hero, heroine, mother, villain.”
It was only after Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015) that Chadha seemed to be getting meatier roles, not primary protagonists, but meatier, nonetheless. Streaming gave her career a new lease — Mirzapur and Bandish Bandits, Taj Mahal 1989, and a more glamorous turn in The Trial, where she plays the head of a law firm.
She also worked across countries — The Signal, Bait and Hamlet — playing essential characters, not mere footnotes.
“It is only in the last four to five years that I am getting such roles,” Chadha says, before clarifying that even the current crop of roles is circumscribed by a larger typecasting, adding, “I would love to be offered roles outside that framework.”
Despite an extensive body of work to look back on, she doesn’t look at the rearview mirror, “I don’t even watch my new shows, forget the older ones,” she says with a laugh, “[Maybe] sometimes if Luck By Chance, which I really enjoyed being part of, pops up. If I saw Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam today, I would probably cringe. But then, in Bhansali’s films, it is very difficult to not feel compelled to hit a high note because his work is operatic.”
Chadha will be seen in the upcoming Mirzapur film adaptation as well as Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana, and the new season of Bakaiti, continuing a career that thrives, even within a framework.