‘A is for Acting'

Sanya Malhotra, with five new films during the pandemic and two more up for release in 2022, opens up about acting workshops to tricks to ace the curly girlie look.

- MANJU LATHA KALANIDHI

Sanya Malhotra is a changeling. All good actors are. She rigorously trained in wrestling for eight months for just a 180-second scene in the blockbuster Dangal starring Aamir Khan in 2016. She chopped off her long, curly locks and was the only girl in the crew to smile afterwards. She lost the final round of a dance reality show in 2009, but choreographed Aamir for the ‘Sexy Baliye’ song in his 2017 production Secret Superstar. Her last four movies were all OTT hits. Her latest role is as G Meenakshi in Meenakshi Sundareshwar, released on Netflix during Diwali. It is now the third-most watched film on the network with over 2.8 million views in the first week. Following the spate of strong female characters in Hollywood and European films, OTT is catching on—Malhotra’s Meenakshi is a strong, vocal and independent Tamil girl who needs to work on her long-distance marriage with her techie husband who pretends to be single in order to get a job. And now she is excited to play the smitten, hands-on wife Siloo in Sam Bahadur opposite Vicky Kaushal. “In the end, it all worked out for me,” she grins. From Meenaskhi to Maneckshaw, that’s quite a career arc for an actor with five years in showbiz.