Perfect Family appealed to the mother in Neha Dhupia before it did to the actor in her. She plays a therapist in the Gulshan Devaiah and Girija Oak-led series about a family that seeks therapy after the youngest member, a child, suffers anxiety. “It wasn’t like I wanted to play a therapist. But when I started reading the script, I couldn’t put it down,” says Dhupia.
The series’ theme of parenting and mental health resonated with the actor, who is a mother to two kids, Mehr and Guriq. “When you have kids, you think everything you are doing is for them. So, you believe you can’t ever go wrong. But what is actually happening to the child? That’s such a huge conversation today. Mental health and AQI are the only two things mothers talk about.”
Pankaj Tripathi
If on screen, she helps a family learn healthier ways to communicate, off it, husband Angad Bedi and she have their own ground rules to build a healthy home for their kids. Gender roles, she says, is the first norm they’re teaching their kids to challenge. “We don’t look at anything as a girl or guy’s job. Recently, at home, my daughter asked me, ‘Mumma, what are you doing now?’ When I replied that I’m sitting with her, she asked, ‘You’re not going to work?’ So, it’s not tuned in her mind that I will sit at home and Papa will go to work. For meals, I lay the table and Angad picks the plates up. It’s the little things [that matter].”