Ranveer Singh's Spy Turn in 'Dhurandhar' and Vicky Kaushal's Torture Scene in 'Chhaava': Preetisheel Singh Decodes The Character Design

The first thing Preetisheel Singh clarifies is that she prefers calling her work “character designing” rather than merely “prosthetics”. It is a combination of hair, make-up, and prosthetics that comes together in her “lab” in Versova, Mumbai.

Her work on a film begins with the script — sitting with the director, understanding the characters and their arcs across both sweeping timelines and intimate moments, as wounds fester and scars deepen. She then creates digital designs, which are shown to the director before bringing the actors in. Live casts — three-dimensional scans — of the actors are then made, for her team to work on, relieving actors from having to sit through endless trials. These casts, made of silicone, have “this lovely quality of imitating skin, when you colour it properly with good blood work.”

Over the past decade and a half, Singh has worked on films such as Haider (2014), Bajirao Mastani (2015), Padmaavat (2018), Kalki 2898 AD (2024), Chhaava (2025), and the recently released Dhurandhar (where her official credit is ‘Character and Prosthetic Designer’) elevating prosthetics to an art form. From small details like ageing wounds and sculpting scars to larger questions of a character’s hair and hairlessness, she has co-created characters that stain public memory.

Despite its importance in the storytelling process and outcome, Singh notes, prosthetics is not considered worthy of an awards category, “Except for the National Awards, it is barely acknowledged.” Prosthetics is still considered a slapdash thing, “only meant to turn people into an old or fat person. It is high time we — and I include the casting director in this — get the recognition that is due.”

Following are five films that Singh worked on, where she outlines her process and the accompanying challenges in her own words:

Dhurandhar

Cracking Ranveer Singh’s hair was important. We had to strike a balance between making it cinematic but not distracting, because he is not a front-and-centre character in the first part. I wanted to show the initial rugged rawness, where he is not grooming himself every day — with unkempt greasy hair, tied into a ponytail sometimes. I even gave him freckles on his face and tanned his skin tone. This builds character.

For Akshaye Khanna, there is a suaveness in his character. He doesn’t need to say much to command attention. I gave him soft waves, and we showed the receding hairline. It is not a full head of hair. I remember doing the trial — he was looking at himself in the mirror, and reminded me of his late father, Vinod Khanna.

Then, to make Arjun Rampal look unattractive was difficult. I wanted his face to be layered under a lot of character streaks and gave him a nice scar across his face. We did the gold plating for two teeth on top and the lower set as well. On the first day of shooting, he had asked if we could take another shot, with a close-up of his face. He did this side smirk, and suddenly you realised, the teeth are what completed his character, Major Iqbal. It is very important to me that even when they are not speaking, the character comes through strongly. Roughly, it would take one-and-a-half hours to prepare. If there was blood work, with scars and bruising, maybe two hours. But time was always of the essence.

Chhaava

For Vicky Kaushal’s climactic torture sequence, the director — Laxman Utekar — told me what his character went through, and how Aurangzeb treated him. I wanted that reality to come across. It was a lynching of skin, so it needed a detailed job, for which we prepped for almost a month and a half. I had to sit with the director and go through the scene in detail, to know where the cutting begins, and build that in terms of design: stage one, stage two, and then stage three, where he is completely lynched and salt is being rubbed on the body. Vicky had come to the lab, and we did a full live cast of his upper body, and built on that.

We would do one layer of muscle structure and tissues and add the skin layer on top of that so we could peel off the top layer, giving the illusion of skinning him. We also made a fake tongue for Vicky which gets cut off, so it sat like a glove on his actual tongue, with blood packets inside.

Jawan

When we were working on the Captain Vikram Rathore character — the father— I wanted the old, strong, muscular look to come through. I got Shah Rukh Khan’s live-cast and worked around his bone structure. If you see the difference between father and son, I shifted the muscle structure of the father’s face — gave him fuller cheekbones, made the laugh lines more prominent, with wrinkles in the under-eyes, and some scars. You could still see it was Shah Rukh Khan. It was not like we completely changed him.

We just stumbled upon the bald look. We were doing trials with different wigs. I wanted to change his natural hairline, so we did a bald cap for him, in order to have a clean palette to work on. At that time, he had this salt and pepper stubble. That was when we realised that he looked good bald, and we built upon that. Shah Rukh is always known for his hair, but there was something suave and sexy about the bald look, too.

Padmaavat

Khilji (Ranveer Singh) is a ferocious character. He would enter the room, and you would feel like a beast has entered. He eats in a raw way. He has chest hair and is unshaven. I wanted to give him an old scar that tells a story — it is across his face, and it is menacing, as though it was clawed by a lion. I wanted this Afghan feel: kohl eyes, light coloured lenses.

Personally, I wanted to give him a gap-tooth, so when he smiles there would be a nice gap. Eventually, it didn’t work out. I then used it in one of Ranveer’s MakeMyTrip ads instead. Ranveer is an actor who trusts the process. He has his eyes closed till I am completely done, which would take about an hour and a half, with the hair and make-up.

Gangubai Kathiawadi

With Gangubai, we wanted to take her character back to the 1950s with the heightened juda hair buns. Alia Bhatt has got a soft baby face, so I wanted to break away from it with the big bindi and the tattoo on her face. In a song like “Dholida” she needs to be sweaty, her hair needs to get messier as she twirls, and the juda (bun) has to come a little loose.

But what was most interesting in that film was the actor Vijay Raaz’s transformation to the hijra (eunuch) politician, Razia Bai. Usually, when you think of such a character you think of someone with a big bindi and long hair. That is usually how men transform into women. But I wanted to do a boy-cut. [The director] Sanjay Leela Bhansali asked, “How can you give a boy cut to someone who was once a man?” But I was inspired by the 1960s English boy cut, with puffy hair. It never grows and Razia curls it. I even faded the eyebrows and made the character draw back those eyebrows. We even got a tattoo and a mole. Everyone was pleasantly surprised by how that turned out.

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