"When you are a queen in your own country, why would you want to go anywhere else?" says Sameera Reddy, the confidence evident in her tone and manner. The actress has progressed dramatically from her Musafir days and a lot of that has to do with her bold decision to abandon Bollywood before Bollywood could abandon her, and embracing the cinema of the South, which has shown her much love and adulation.

In Priyadarshan's Tezz, set to release on April 27, Reddy plays a bad-ass antagonist chased by law-enforcer Anil Kapoor's choppers and bullets. In this interview with Ankur Pathak, Sameera talks about the politics within the industry and why one must leave the game if one doesn't know how to play it.

How challenging is it for a woman to do an edgy, action film like Tezz? I have done the most difficult scene any girl has ever done on screen. It is a very important bike scene. I had to go through intensive training before pulling it off because we couldn't cheat the audience by using a body double here. For someone like me, who couldn't even ride a Scooty, it was liberating, to say the least.

Why was it "the most difficult scene any girl has ever done"? In one scene, I'm being chased by cops and have to jump into a river. I remember the temperature was two degrees and we were freezing like ice cubes. I had to get in the river with two huge bags, go underwater for like 20 seconds, and dive away from there. It was physically as well as mentally exhausting and I felt my head is going to explode any second. I had to do this six times before we got it right.