How to cast Sarita Choudhury? The American film industry is still wrestling with the question. The co-star of last year's "Mississippi Masala" is young, beautiful and multiracial - half-Indian, half-English. Is she doomed to play colorful exotics? Or has she become an accepted part of the '90s cultural mosaic?
"Things are changing in terms of the parts I'm offered," says the 26-year-old Choudhury (Chow-der-ree), whose latest film is "Wild West." "I can go from Spanish to Italian to Indian, but there are now a lot of scripts that demand simply an urban character with no specifics."She's sitting in the trendy Merc Bar in SoHo, sipping from a glass of white wine and smoking filtered cigarettes. Dressed down in jeans and sleeveless T-shirt, her long black hair hiding her face, Choudhury's stunning good looks light up the room. She's a fast talker who emphasizes her comments with choppy hand gestures and a film novice who's not afraid to speak her mind about the business.
Choudhury is particularly vocal about the film industry's "sham" attempts to appeal to nonwhite audiences. "They realize there's no longer just a white audience out there," she says, "but they're not giving money to the right people. Like it took Julie Dash (director of "Daughters of the Dust") ages to get money for a feature. Usually they'll give the money to Eddie Murphy."
Choudhury has been living in SoHo on and off for the last three years. She was born in London but grew up in Jamaica, Mexico and Rome, where her father worked as a biologist for the United Nations. After graduating with degrees in film and economics from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, she worked at a variety of jobs, including modeling, before being cast as Denzel Washington's co-star in "Masala," an interracial love story set in the Deep South.
Though untrained as an actress, Choudhury's unaffectedly sexy performance won critical raves. She's taking acting lessons now but still counts on her natural style.
"You have to rely on instinct," she says. "It can be a plus because I have no baggage to hold me down. But there is still that moment before `action' when I'm not really sure where I am."
That's hard to tell in "Wild West," a ditzy little comedy about a group of London-based Pakistanis who form a country-and-Western band. Sarita plays the married woman who's recruited to sing with the group, then falls for its leader.
"Wild West" seems to be part of Choudhury's career game plan, an attempt to show diversity in a variety of roles. She'll soon be seen in "House of the Spirits," a big-budget screen version of the Isabel Allende novel, which stars Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons. Early next year, she heads to Malaysia to shoot "Raging Earth," an eco-thriller starring Patrick Bergin and Helen Mirren.
"I play a woman involved in corporate infiltration into Third- World countries," she says. "I've even got action scenes."