Lisa Haydon: “If the only messaging of my life is that I’m good-looking, I would feel like I have failed”

Within the first few minutes of our lunch, Lisa Haydon tears up. Twice. Three things become immediately clear. First, she’s extremely likeable, a real girl’s girl with the kind of disarming sincerity that makes you want to root for her and hope you can be friends. Second, in the almost-decade that she’s largely stayed away from the public eye, she’s been through significant turmoil and transformation that have changed her foundationally. And third, this is going to be a challenging interview.

I’m waiting for Haydon in the maximalist parlour of Scarlett House, Malaika Arora’s buzzy Indo-Portuguese restaurant in Mumbai’s Pali village. “Hey,” she says upon arriving, upbeat but apprehensive. “I’m Lisa.” I’m expecting a glittering, jet-setting former It girl to show up and, instead, a goofy mom of three sporting printed tights and a body-morphing tee plops down on the chair opposite me, her eyes brimming with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she purrs in an accent I can’t quite discern. “My agent sent me your questions on the way here. They’re deep, and the answers run deeper. I don’t know if you’re ready for that.” She wipes away the moisture from her eyes as she observes my surprise. “I thought you would just ask me about my skincare,” she laughs, lightening the tenor. “No one in the public has ever wanted to know me in this way.”

At 39, Haydon looks refreshingly like herself with ebony hair, face wash-commercial skin and no apparent makeup. Unlike many of her contemporaries, not to mention much younger actors, she doesn’t seem to have plumped her fine lines into the atmosphere. Her face, youthful in its planes and shadows, the near-perfect symmetry accentuated by the ambient light of the restaurant, is made for the screen. “I don’t feel famous in my day-to-day,” she remarks, interrupting my assiduous assessment of her. “Eleven months a year, I forget that I’m anything other than a mom.” The actor, who lives in Phuket with her businessman husband Dino Lalvani and their children, worked as a model until she was spotted by Anil Kapoor in a cafe and cast in Aisha (2010). The camera was instantly smitten, but Haydon has always had a push-and-pull relationship with fame. You’d think she would capitalise on the popularity that characters like Vijayalakshmi (Queen) and Lisa (Ae Dil Hai Mushkil) earned her. Yet, she doesn’t seem to crave recognition at all. That’s not to say she doesn’t put in the work because she approaches every gig with dogged determination, like she’s still got a lot to prove. “I’ve always preferred to stay on the outskirts so I could retreat, work on myself and come back more interesting,” she admits. She brings her hair to one side and twists it into a lopsided braid, distractedly. “I admire the people who are in the heat of things, entrenched in fame and success permanently. It’s very hard. Takes a lot of inner strength.”