It was 2014 and she shared a flat in Yari Road, Andheri, with five other women. What seemed like the end of the world resulted in her deciding to stay back in Mumbai to see if she can build an acting career. “I did a couple of auditions and was in the Top 100 but could not get through. After graduating in economics from Gargi College, she joined a ballet company and participated in a dance reality show that got her to Mumbai. “I was a shy and introverted child, but when I was in my own world, which was after school, in my room in front of the mirror, I turned into a drama queen,” she says. Secret, because she felt no one would take her seriously. Malhotra grew up in Delhi harbouring a secret dream of becoming a dancer and an actor. “I am a self-taught actor, and whatever I have learnt is on the job,” she says. The actor, on her part, is always keen to get feedback that will help her improve her craft.
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Critic Nandini Ramnath, reviewing Meenakshi Sundareshwar for Scroll, says that “in a movie that misses the big picture of whatever it is trying to say, Malhotra is among the few grace notes”.īist calls Malhotra a “complete performer and an honest human being”, something he believes gets reflected in the characters she portrays on screen. Since her debut in 2016 with Nitesh Tiwari’s wrestling drama Dangal starring Aamir Khan, the 29-year-old has essayed a range of characters, like the spiteful and loud Chhutki in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Pataakha (2018), shy and reticent Miloni in Ritesh Batra’s Photograph (2019), and most recently a free-spirited and confident Tamil woman in Vivek Soni’s Netflix film Meenakshi Sundareshwar that released to mixed reviews on November 5.
No wonder then that Malhotra describes her film career as a “roller-coaster ride”. And then it becomes difficult to maintain boundaries.” “It is tough, because at times when you have to induce certain emotions for a role that you have never personally experienced in life, you make back-stories for your characters and imagine things about them.
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If there is one big lesson the actor is still learning in her five-year-old career in the Hindi film industry, it is how to disassociate with onscreen roles. “It is difficult for me to get a character out of my system,” Malhotra tells Forbes India over a phone call from Mumbai. And every time she forgets herself in a character, Bist continues, she shines in her performance, but gets affected as if all those things are happening to her in real life. “She said she felt as if it was Sandhya living there and not Sanya,” he says, calling Malhotra an inquisitive actor and a diligent learner.