Thaindian News

New Delhi, March 30 (IANS) Caterina is international pop star Jennifer Lopez’s cousin and loves everything about Bollywood - its song-dance culture, superstar Shah Rukh Khan and it’s fun experience. She feels that Hollywood has become too repetitive and says she bows down to the “beautiful Sheilas and Munnis” as they are “awesome”.

She will make her Bollywood debut with an item song in the movie “Bhindi Baazaar. Inc”.

“Bollywood style of dancing is not easy. Everybody thinks it is easy, but it’s not! I bow down to beautiful Sheilas and Munnis because they are awesome. I am getting the hang of it,” Caterina, a trained hip-hop and salsa dancer, told IANS in an interview.

“I feel Hollywood needs to change things around as the movies are becoming too repetitive. May be they could just start having some singing and dancing in their movies.

“In Bollywood films, you have a lot of singing and dancing whereas Hollywood is just about acting. So I find Bollywood really attractive, it’s fun,” she added.

Caterina is ready to woo Indian audiences with her groves in the item song “Taan ke seena” and says it was quite a challenge for her.

“For me, learning Hindi words, being able to lip sync them and pronoucing them correctly was definitely difficult, but it was a good learning experience,” she said.

“I am a huge fan of movies and I also read about the war going on between Munni and Sheila. I felt the songs were the typical Hindi movie item songs and I loved them.”

She enjoys her on and off stay in India.

“Experience of shooting for the film was good. Everybody on the sets and all the actors were very helpful. I didn’t really know anyone. I was also nervous about how everything will work, but everyone was fun on the sets. They used to crack jokes whenever I was stressed out,” said Caterina.

“When you are filming for a Bollywood movie, there are a hundred people on the set and that is something I wasn’t really used to. So I had to pretend that there are not too many people around,” added Bollywood’s new item girl who worked as a model in New York earlier.

Born and brought up in Arizona, Caterina comes from a big family - she has seven brothers and sisters.

Caterina is a huge fan of Shah Rukh Khan and Imran Khan, but she wants to do an item song with Akshay.

“I have a huge crush on Shah Rukh Khan, I haven’t got a chance to meet him but hopefully I will. His smile is amazing and he is very smart. The way he promotes and pushes himself, it’s very fascinating. Imran Khan is a very good actor. I saw him in ‘Luck’ and he was amazing,” she said.

“I really want to do an item song with Akshay Kumar because I feel we will have the best chemistry ever; he seems like so hilarious, I like him,” she added.

Caterina is happy to see that Bollywood is opening up to foreigners and unlike the common perception that foreigners come and go, she says she is here to stay for long.

(Priyanka Sharma can be contacted at priyanka.s@ians.in)