“That scene — shooting in New York City is something else. You had people walking down the street who thought it was real, so they started chasing after him, like, ‘I’ll get it for you, sister!’ Just booking after this poor actor who didn’t get to explain,” Choudhury said in a recent interview.
In the new season, Choudhury was happy to have the chance to bring out more dimensions of Seema, especially the fun and playful scenes. She noted that in “Season one, [Seema] was working a lot more, but in two, she’s really out and about.” This time, there are more fancy dinners and galas where all the characters mingle, setting the stage for plenty of drama.
Many episodes employ that classic structure familiar to fans of the original series: We see a character (or several) dealing with a disastrous date or relationship quandary, and then the show cuts to several of them discussing it over drinks or brunch. Seema has multiple dating debacles throughout this season. In last week’s season premiere, she discovers her boyfriend still lives with his ex-wife, a major red flag. And in an upcoming episode, a guy she picks up at a bar has, shall we say, issues in the bedroom.
“There’s always a situation where you’re like, ‘Oh, what’s this going to be?’ ‘Oh, who’s that?’ Or, ‘Oh, he’s kind of cute, but what’s that?’ Everything had a twist very quickly,” Choudhury said of her scenes this season. “I just had a ball doing it because those quick turns are so fun for an actor. You have to change your face very quickly into shock and horror.”
“What I loved about that scene was she really cares about her bag,” Choudhury added, connecting that moment to something that, to me, is particularly refreshing about Seema as a character. As Seema describes in the episode, she purchased the bag after landing her first major real estate deal. Throughout the series, in Seema, we get to see a woman who is enjoying her professional success and has no interest in a marriage or a long-term relationship. That kind of character still feels relatively rare (even more rare when it’s a South Asian woman in her 50s).
Being proudly single can be freeing. But in a world where marriage is often the norm, it is also challenging. “And Just Like That…” explores that through Seema’s character at several points this season in ways consistent with the show. For instance, in an upcoming episode, Seema and Carrie decide to split a vacation home rental in the Hamptons. “I can’t spend another weekend sharing a room with a married friend’s kid’s surfboard,” Seema complains to Carrie.
In an episode later this season, she and Carrie book massages at a spa — only to find that because it’s Valentine’s Day, the spa is only doing couples massages. Seema gives the front desk person a piece of her mind: “Do you have a date set aside where you ban couples? No? Because single people have rights, too.”
“So there’s an example of a scene where I learned so much about Seema,” she said. “For me, all that’s important are the words that are on the page, not anything else. And my physicality, I’m really into the props — I love that kind of stuff. But the words inform. I can get from the words literally what Seema was like as a child.”
“There’s something, to me, golden about getting a script and having to make it work. I like that challenge,” Choudhury said. “So that’s how I love playing it. Like, ‘OK, this is the writing, but I can do anything. I can do anything with my body, with my face.’ So that’s where I can rewrite it if I have to at all.”
This content was originally published here.
