Deepika Padukone On Her Experience Of Serving On The Cannes Jury: It Gives Me Goosebumps

Since the last few years, Deepika Padukone has been taking the red carpet by storm at the Cannes Film Festival but this year, there's one more reason for the Bollywood star to rejoice as she has made it to the Cannes jury.

While speaking with Variety magazine, Deepika opened up on her experience of serving on the Cannes jury and revealed that she is having a time of her life there.

The Chhapaak star said, "It gives me goosebumps every single time I walk into the Palais and we leave - it gives me goosebumps because every single person on that seat is there to celebrate cinema. You might love it, you might hate it, but everyone's there just rooting for film, rooting for that experience. Everybody's so disciplined, everyone is seated on time, everyone's phones are switched off. Everyone waits for the end credits to happen. And everyone's like clapping to the end. And everybody stands up."

Deepika admitted that she wasn't familiar with the work of some of her fellow jurors and added, "And I think what all of us, which we discovered after we met the first evening, was to actually read up on our fellow jury members and watch some of their work. So even when you deliberate, you understand where they're coming from, or what is the kind of cinema that that speaks to them and so on.

The actress said that she finds her journey fascinating from being a promising badminton player to a model to an actor and now to the Cannes jury, when she takes pause to look back at it.

She elaborated, "Models have always been written off as people who cannot act, either you're a model or you're an actor, and the two things in people's minds cannot coexist. So from beginning my journey like that, to making my debut, and now 15 years in, to having evolved as as a person, in a professional capacity, and a personal capacity, I have learned from every experience."

Deepika said that the athelete in her allowed her mind to be open, make choices and independent decisions, make mistakes, and learn from them, adding that over a period of time, things became clearer and clearer for her.

She said that while she sees being on the Cannes jury as a natural progression of her journey, she was suprised when she received the invite for the same.

"They [the festival management] seem so convinced about why they made that decision. And it makes me sit back and think sometimes maybe I've not given myself enough credit. And that's okay too, because, I don't want to be feeling like, like this huge achievement or whatever. If I've landed here today, without even realizing it, I must be doing something right. And therefore, I don't want to think too much about what led me to come here. What I want to do is actually continue on that journey, which is continue to be honest in the process, and then when moments like these have to happen, they'll happen anyway," the magazine quoted her as saying.

With regards to her Bollywood career, the actress has multiple projects lined up which include Shah Rukh Khan-John Abraham-starrer Pathan, Hrithik Roshan's Fighter, The Intern and Project K alongside Amitabh Bachchan and Prabhas.