Subhash K Jha

Mumbai, Sep 20: "It does feel like a very different kind of pairing, doesn't it?" says Vidya Balan about her latest co-star.

Of late Vidya Balan is feeling very glamorous. "For a song in Munnabhai 2 in Goa with Sanjay Dutt I had to go through sixteen costume changes in the course of the song. Isn't that cool?" Vidya sounds as excited as Mumtaz who changed into dozens of costumes for a film called 'Roop Tera Mastana'.

After sizzlers like Bipasha Basu and Priyanka Chopra, John goes for a complete about-turn in Nikhil Advani's Salaam-e-Ishq.

Vidya seems very happy with John. "No two actors could be more different in personality . John is very cosmopolitan and I'm very Indian in look and attitude. I think that friction in our personalities is essential to our on-screen compatibility. That's how our director Nikhil Advani saw us…We're two completely antithetical souls from the outside. I'm the simple homely girl, while he's the cool dude. But scratch the surface, and we're a perfectly compatible couple. Isn't that how it is in real life too?"

Director Nikhil Advani wants Vidya's maturity in matters of the heart to show on screen. "That's the quality I want to bring out in their on-screen chemistry. The Vidya-John pairing is so fresh…like East meeting West. The two are so different in all aspects …their body language, their approach to a scene…everything is so different. I'm really excited about how their pair looks on screen," says Advani whose film already has a chalk-and-cheese pair Govinda and the South African actress Shanon.

Vidya had thirty whole days to get acquainted with the finer points of John's personality "He's so hassle-free and so much fun to work with. I may look like this demure Indian girl . But I like my share of fun. I think John and I are going to make a great on-screen couple."