Pretty actress Jacinda Barrett, pictured left, alongside designer Donna Karan confesses immediately that much more than anything else she wanted to work with Nair.
After films like The Last King Of Scotland and Ladder 44, The Namesake casts her as the cheerful, wealthy young woman who comes from a seemingly liberal family. She is the Maxine who happens to be Gogol's first love.
Barrett also says she had read the novel and admired it considerably before she came aboard. "I was head over heels," she confesses, "and I am still in love with the book and what Mira has done with it. I really loved the story because it has so many different colors and shades."
Her relationship with Gogol looks like a recipe for success, but it is the novelist's brilliance, she says, that it becomes seriously flawed. Gogol never lets Maxine into his real world while Maxine draws him into her family without becoming part of his. Barrett thinks audiences from all kinds of background can immediately identify with the flawed relationship between Gogol and Maxine.
She is convinced the film will have broad appeal. What moved her about the story, she says, could move anyone. "It is all about working out who you are and where you belong."
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