Before Pa. Ranjith’s Vettuvam reaches screens in December, Sobhita Dhulipala is taking stock of a decade that began with a crown and a closed door. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, the Visakhapatnam-born actor remembers moving to Mumbai after winning Femina Miss India Earth in 2013, convinced she had “more to say.” The auditions that followed told a different story.
The template that said no
The feedback, she recalls, rarely changed: she did not belong. Dhulipala points to a prevailing heroine mould that prized a “performative bubbliness” — a look-and-behaviour code that left her, in her own account, confused and angry.
That anger found an outlet in Raman Raghav 2.0, Anurag Kashyap’s thriller with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vicky Kaushal, where she played the female lead. By then she had stopped negotiating with the template. “If I don’t belong, fine. I don’t even want to belong,” she said.
Range as an answer
What followed reads as a deliberate counter-argument, built one language at a time.
- Hindi: Made in Heaven, Raman Raghav 2.0
- Telugu: Goodachari, Major
- Tamil: Ponniyin Selvan films
- Malayalam: Moothon, Kurup
- English: Monkey Man (2024)
Looking back, Dhulipala says she recognises the running pattern: “I am often a woman whose centre of gravity is in herself. She’s not there to prop up a man’s thing.”
What the male gaze leaves out
Her sharper argument concerns the audience. Indian screens, she says, have long defined women through the male gaze — as the hero’s mother or partner. That framing excludes a large female audience that wants to see women as themselves on screen, not as accessories to a male arc.
The “performative bubbliness” she describes is not anecdotal; it is a template with a long commercial history, one that Hindi cinema has only recently begun to question through characters allowed to be uningratiating, angry or ambitious. It recasts her early rejection as an industry category error rather than a newcomer’s failure.
The December return
Vettuvam brings Dhulipala back to Tamil cinema after the two Ponniyin Selvan films. She has described the post-apocalyptic action film as her strongest work so far and an “extraordinary project.” The December release will test whether the actor who refused to belong has built, across five industries at once, a place that needed no permission.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter India
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