After her long musical career and making her on screen acting debut last year with Call Me Bae and doing The Royals this year, Lisa Mishra returned to her old love, theatre after 15 years, at the Prithvi theatre festival recently. Being a part of a musical directed by Akarsh Khurana, the artiste admits, “It’s a bit overwhelming because it’s a lot of work. I had forgotten you know how much goes into producing such a long format thing live. While I was excited to go back, I was also a little bit terrified. It is sort of an ultimate challenge as it’s both my acting and music careers meeting in the middle.”

While she had been away from acting on stage for one-and-a-half decade, Lisa asserts that her musical side helped her prep for it. “The stage comfort comes naturally to me as a musician. As an actor, we get a lot of chances and a lot of takes on screen, but the difference between doing theatre and screen is the fact that you don’t get a second chance on stage. This is something I already know how to handle because as a musician, we play live shows all the time. So the musical career in my life has helped me prepare for stage,” Lisa Mishra says.

Ask her what she missed the most about theatre and she shares, “I missed the challenge of doing something in such a long format live. My shows, as a touring artiste, are typically 90 long, but my material is something I’ve rehearsed for seven years. So, to have the challenge of doing an hour and 30 minutes of a play, with new music while remembering my lines to deliver them perfectly, that’s what I’d been missing.”

She adds, “Although I have done musical theatre before, I’m doing this now after I’ve established myself as a screen actor and that puts a little bit more pressure on me to act well.” Lisa calls her journey in showbiz as a “playbook for anybody who believes in hard work”. “A lot of people assume that after you get your big break, which came for me about seven years ago, it’s smooth sailing. But honestly, in a city as competitive as Mumbai, you have to reinvent yourself and find ways to survive everyday. We don’t have the luxury of slowing down. You don’t just get handed work everywhere you go. You have to seek out whatever it is that you want to do and you have to keep pushing for yourself and advocating for yourself.”

Up next, Lisa is set to start shooting for Call Me Bae season 2 and she is all excited for it. “We start filming shortly. Immediately after my play at Prithvi, everybody’s back on Call Me Bae and we just did our table read with the whole cast and it went so well. Season two is gonna be incredible. It’s so well written and the characters have evolved very beautifully. We have very high expectations to live up to,” she shares, updating on the progress on The Royals season 2 as well: “It has just started preliminary work, so we’re yet to hear about where our characters go in their arcs and when we will be shooting. But I know that pre-production is on right now.”