Anyone who watched the highly addictive, six-episode documentary Wild Wild Country on Netflix last year knows exactly who the star of the show really is. It’s not the shadowy Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who died in 1990. It’s not his various followers, either, or the local Oregonians who went to war with his “free love” cult’s intrusion on their rural way of life. No: it’s his onetime assistant and spokeswoman, Ma Anand Sheela, who both transfixed the nation back in the 1980s and stole the docuseries with the magnetic interview she gave filmmaking brothers Chapman and Maclain Way decades later. Is it any wonder, then, that such a juicy and inscrutable woman would fascinate one of the most famous Indian actresses in the world: Priyanka Chopra?
Appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Wednesday, Chopra revealed that she is hard at work developing a film based on the documentary and the Rajneeshpuram community, in conjunction with Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson. Chopra expressed particular interest in Ma Anand Sheela, calling her “devious” and crediting her with creating “a whole cult in America.” Though Chopra doesn’t say outright that she plans to play Sheela in the film, she did tell DeGeneres that she would be starring in it as well as producing—so get your matching burgundy power suits ready.
Though the documentary was tremendously compelling, there were some questions about how accurately the Way brothers depicted facets of the Rajneeshpuram’s rise in the Pacific Northwest. The story has plenty of provable, sensational moments, including the fact that Sheela—who moved to Switzerland in the late 80s and now runs a care home there—pled guilty to counts of “attempted murder, electronic eavesdropping, immigration fraud, and engineering a salmonella outbreak that sickened more than 750 people.”
But after the Emmy-winning docuseries aired on Netflix, several former members of the community protested its depiction of the Rajneeshpuram community. Some called it shallow and puritan; others outlined the horrors the series left out of the narrative.
A fictionalized version of events, honed down to feature-length and directed by Levinson, has even less of a chance of getting the story exactly right, to everyone’s satisfaction. But in all likelihood, there will be one person extremely pleased by the news of this project: Sheela herself. She’s a woman who never shied away from playing the villain if it got her more time in the spotlight. The most common word former Rajneeshees use to describe her is “ego.”
Of Sheela’s central role in Wild Wild Country, author John Jameson told the Cut last year: “The only thing I didn’t like was that Sheela was given so much air time, which is, of course, what she absolutely adores, given the egotist she is. She got far more attention than she deserved, in my opinion. In my book, she was the big bad wolf. It all went wrong because of her.”
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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