‘It was scary for me, he followed me home’: Sonali Bendre talks about how her silent, dialogue-free performance in ‘Raakh’ was very internal and terrifying

Sonali Bendre spoke candidly about the emotional heaviness of playing Mona in the crime thriller Raakh on Prime Video. The actor said the character’s quiet sadness and limited dialogue made the role deeply internal.

While she found working without long dialogue scenes easier than expected, leaving a character behind after a day of filming was much more difficult. Bandar said the intensity of Mona’s journey sometimes followed her home during filming.Bendar spoke to IANS after the release of the song Raakh, which is now streaming on Prime Video. The series is a fictional investigative story set in the late 1970s and is inspired by the Ranga Billa case involving the kidnapping and murder of siblings Geeta and Sanjay Chopra in Delhi.

Sonali Bendre plays Mona in Raakh

Bender said that writing and preparing for the series gave her a strong foundation before she started performing. “I would say more than 50% of the project is already done,” she said, thanks to the materials provided by the team.Mona has relatively few spoken lines in the series. Bandar said this aspect was to her advantage. “Not doing dialogue was the easiest part for me,” she said, adding that she no longer finds it easy to memorize pages of dialogue as she did earlier in her career.

The actor explained that silence brought a different challenge. Using fewer lines, she had to convey Mona’s pain through expression, pauses, and emotional restraint. This process required her to hold on to the character’s state of mind for a longer period.Bender said the role became more realistic because it had to be understood. She described the difficulty of separating from Mona once the cameras stopped filming.

The cast and crew of Raakh, a crime thriller

“It’s more absorbing and that makes it more real as well,” Bender said while discussing her approach to the role. She admitted that she struggled to put the character aside at the end of the day.“This was one of the characters I struggled to leave behind on set,” she said. “I would bring him home sometimes and it would be scary for me.”‘Raakh’ follows an investigation that leads to a nationwide manhunt and explores the clash between crime and justice.

The show uses a fantasy format while drawing from a case that shocked Delhi in the late 1970s.The series stars Ali Fazal, Sonali Bendre, Aamir Bashir, Akash Makhija, and Ramandeep Yadav. Brossett Roy directs and executive produces the show. Bandar’s comments underscore how Mona’s controlled presence shaped her performance in Rakh, where emotion often comes through silence rather than speech.