Now it can be told. Action filmmaker Rohit Shetty had planned Lady Singham for his Cop Universe somewhere between 2018 and 2021. That was the period when Rohit was between Ranveer Singh’s Simmba and Akshay Kumar’s Sooryavanshi. Both of them cop action dramas that made the box office tills jingle. But Singham Again, which releases this Friday, was nowhere on his horizon. Yet the director had this germ of an idea about casting a leading Bollywood actress as a woman super cop in one of his forthcoming films. For Rohit had told PeepingMoon.com in an exclusive interview in January 2021, “I want to do it and Rohit Shetty Picturez is developing it.”

It is not known whether Rohit had Deepika Padukone in mind to play Shakti Shetty, aka Lady Singham, back then, because he must have seen a lot of the actress when shooting with her newly-married husband Ranveer for Simmba. Or whether the director decided on the actress as his lady super cop after seeing Deepika in action in Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan and Pathaan last year. Whatever, Deepika as Shakti Shetty in Singham Again adds a zing to the Cop Universe so far made up of alpha males like Ajay Devgn, Akshay Kumar and Ranveer Singh.

The director had quite liked Hollywood actresses Angelina Jolie and Jodie Foster playing law enforcement officers in serial killer films like The Bone Collector and Silence of the Lambs? “I want to do that. In fact, I’m developing such a character. I don’t know if I will direct that film. But, oh yeah, there’s definitely the germ of an idea of a woman cop film. That’s how the universe will get complete, you know. There has to be a woman super cop too. But there’s still time for that.” This was in January 2021. That time has come. Let’s welcome Lady Singham aka Shakti Shetty in Singham Again this Friday!