From Dangal to Pagglait, every role is a challenge, every part is fresh, and doing things the easy way seems to be an alien concept.
In an interview a couple of years ago, Sanya Malhotra told me that the most adventurous thing she has ever done was riding a 350cc Bullet from Manali to Leh. Many might disagree with her on that one though, because her career has been nothing if not adventurous.
It has not been easy for the 29-year-old though. Having trained in contemporary dance and ballet, Malhotra moved from New Delhi to Mumbai after finishing college in order to participate in reality show Dance India Dance . And while she did not make it past the Top 100, she stayed back in the city of dreams chasing her own ambitions of making it as an actor. What followed was the rigour of the audition circuit and a few small gigs in commercials, both in front of the camera and also assisting behind the scenes.
Having shared screen space with another female actor in her first two films, Malhotra’s first leading lady role came about a few months later with Badhaai Ho , one of the top grossing films of 2018. It is probably her safest role to date, playing the supportive girlfriend to Ayushmann Khurrana’s character in a film that really was hijacked by its older cast (Neena Gupta, Gajraj Rao, and Surekha Sikri). It is easy, after all, to build a successful résumé by picking up the heroine roles in films dominated by other people – it is something most of our leading ladies in the past would do. Not so much for this generation though, as evidenced by young Malhotra. Not only did she hold her own amongst the seasoned cast of Badhaai Ho , she followed it up with what is arguably her most solid performance till date.
The Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019) was the first film Malhotra had signed after Dangal , though it ended up getting made and released only a couple of years later. The intimate story of an unlikely couple finding each other amidst the chaos that is Mumbai, made waves at the Sundance Film Festival that year. More than the film though, it was the then-27-year-old Malhotra who caught the attention of the international film fraternity. So much did she impress with her performance as the fake fiancée of a struggling street photographer Rafi (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) that The Hollywood Reporter named her as one of the five breakout talents to watch out for at the Berlin Film Festival.
It is this drive to keep learning new things that has pushed Malhotra to foray into unfamiliar territory with every role that she picks. 2020 saw her in a couple of streaming releases. True to form, her roles in the two films are like chalk and cheese. In Ludo , she plays a young woman desperate to marry a rich man, and her on-screen chemistry with Aditya Roy Kapur hogged paragraphs in every review of the film. In Shakuntala Devi , she plays the role of the disillusioned daughter, and brings a certain amount of nuance to that troubled relationship between mother and daughter.
“It’s a very complex character,” says Sanya Malhotra about Sandhya, from her upcoming film Pagglait, which premieres on Netflix on 26 March.
From Publisher: Firstpost
