Next week, Nargis Fakhri is flying down from her Los Angeles home to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyztan to start shooting for her upcoming Bollywood film Torbaaz.
The model-turnedactress and who moved back to the US right when her 2016 Ritesh Deshmukh-starrer, Banjo, was up for release, is now set for a comeback as a NGO worker Ayesha, who looks after war refugee kids in Afghanistan.
She plays Sanjay Dutt's love interest whose worldview changes after the stint and returns to her hometown with the sole purpose of helping rebuild Afghanistan after years of war and destruction.
Written and directed by Girish Malik, who made his debut with the 2014 drama Jal and the action-thriller highlights young children who are trained to become suicide bombers.
After Jal, which bagged the National Film Award for Best Special Effects, Girish had been toying with this idea for the last three years.
"Nargis is playing the parallel lead and has already begun taking language classes in LA for Pushto and Dari, both of which she will be using extensively," says Rahul Mittra, who is co-producing the film with Wave Cinemas' Raju Chadha.
One of Mittra's proteges had taken up Nargis's work in India and informed him that she was arriving in Mumbai for a short trip. "We met at Girish's suburban home two weeks ago.
Nargis was tired and jetlagged but the meeting went great and she immediately gave her nod after hearing the story.
She will stun everybody with her dialogue delivery in this film," Mittra adds. On Tuesday, the producer takes off to Kyrgyztan with Sanjay to kick of the film's first schedule which will run through Christmas and New Year's Eve. "We will start in Bishkek and travel along the Silk Route through Central Asia.
The film will feature different terrains and we will be shooting through the biting cold in difficult locations that have never been tapped by Bollywood before," Mittra informs. On November 30, Mirror had reported that Nargis's latest visit to Mumbai had sent rumour mills into an overdrive with reports of reconciliation and a subsequent wedding with former flame Uday Chopra.
While the actress's spokesperson had denied the news, revealing that she was in the Maximum City for an upcoming collaboration with American rapper Snoop Dogg, Nargis had dropped by Yash Chopra's Juhu bungalow for a few hours, during which she met with Uday and his mother, Pamela Chopra, with whom she remains close even after the break-up. And now we know, she was also gearing up for her Bollywood comeback.