Raima Sen: The last couple of years I have only done OTT work and I love it

Actor Raima Sen started her acting career with films and continued working on the big screen for many years. However, keeping up with the times, the actor has now transitioned to the digital platforms, with a number of web projects, both in Hindi and Bengali language, to her credit.

Terming the web, as a ‘more freeing medium’, she says, “In the last couple of year, I’ve only done OTT work, and I must admit that I loved and enjoyed it a lot. I think now because of the pandemic, nobody wants to venture out to cinemas and that’s why the medium is working a lot with people.”

The actor, who has starred in OTT projects such as Hello (three seasons), Love Bites, Parchhayee, Black Widows and The Last Hour goes on to laud the pros this medium for being experimental and welcoming.

“What helps is the fact that these OTT platforms have really good content, new faces, new directors and even old faces that you haven’t seen in the last 20 years. In the end, you’re actually satisfied watching TV at home,” she explains.

While now Sen, 41, has become an ardent admirer of OTT, she admits having apprehensions before signing her debut project on the platform. Asserting that she was not sure about investing so much time and energy for the web project, the Parineeta (2015) actor says, “For my first web series, Hello, the makers of my films Choker Bali (2002) approached me and said, ‘We’re doing a web show and it’s going to be a first web show in Bengali’. But I was very sceptical, because I had to give in lot many hours for a month long shoot schedule. At first, I thought it was too much of hard work and effort to shoot for one month everyday for 14 hours. But they insisted that I take the risk, and I trusted them.”

Indeed, the response to her first web series helped her shed all inhibitions. “It was so much of hard work to do a series. Being in character for a month, remembering the character graph… But after it became a hit, my fear of shooting so much, learning so many dialogues went away,” she ends.