Five years ago, Bipasha Basu was actually supposed to start her career with a Mughal costume drama, director JP Dutta's Aakhri Mughal opposite Abhishek Bachchan. But unfortunately, that project never took off.

Bipasha's latest period project is Raj Kumar Santoshi's Ashok. The actress is hopeful that the film will take off on schedule. Bipasha is really excited about about doing the costume drama, which would require her to go back in time. The character of Tishayraksha is multi-dimensional and is present throughout the film. Waxing eloquent about Santoshi, Bipasha says that he is a great visionary. She also admits that it requires a lot of guts to cast someone like her, who has such a contemporary image in the Mauryan era. Ashok is Bipasha's only chance so far to do a costume drama. Earlier, there was Rituparno Ghosh's Draupadi, where the director was very keen to cast her as the queen of the Pandavas. Anyways, Madhur Bhandrakar, Santoshi and Ghosh are three of the directors that Bipasha has always admired and now it seems that she will have worked with all of them. The actress has been shooting for Ghosh's Sab Charitro Kalpunik. Also on the anvil is another costume drama, Ben Kingsley's Taj Mahal. But that film is going to take some time. Till then what Bipasha has in hand right now is Siddharth Anand's film for Yash Raj, opposite Ranbir Kapoor. Though there are other leading ladies in the film, Bipasha is confident that she will be strongly noticed.