Aditi Sandhya Sharma speaks about Gajab Raat with the clarity of someone who has already internalised its central lesson. The Raipur-born actor, who moved to Mumbai to pursue acting, plays Arya Sahni in the digital film: a young woman with outsized ambition and the nerve to chase it. For readers who follow Hindi cinema’s next generation, the conversation doubles as a short masterclass in how young actors absorb a set’s culture.
The character behind the choice
The script, she says, sold itself. “What drew me to Gajab Raat was Arya Sahni herself,” Sharma told The Times of India. “She’s a girl with big dreams, the determination to chase them, and the courage to take risks along the way.” That resonance is not accidental. Sharma’s own route from Raipur to Mumbai mirrors the same gamble: leaving a hometown, betting on craft, and accepting that a career in entertainment offers few guarantees.
Arya’s appeal, in Sharma’s telling, is not the project’s scale but the character’s spine. She points to ambition and risk-taking rather than romance or spectacle. That distinction matters in a digital film landscape crowded with small-town strivers; a performer choosing a project for the character’s will, and not the film’s surface, signals where she intends to steer her filmography.
What Manoj Bajpayee’s set taught her
For many young actors, sharing a frame with Manoj Bajpayee would be a study in pressure. Sharma expected exactly that: a serious set, a senior actor wrapped in concentration. Instead, she found warmth. He asked what she was getting for lunch, and joked about wanting some of it too. “Those little moments really stayed with me because they made the whole experience feel so relaxed and comfortable,” she said.
The larger lesson took shape through observation. Bajpayee, she noted, switches effortlessly between the actor audiences watch on screen and the easygoing person he is before action and after cut. “You don’t have to be intimidating to be brilliant at what you do,” she said. Set culture, in that sense, is its own form of mentorship: a calm room gives a younger actor permission to be present rather than merely to survive the day. Sharma says she could relax into her performance because the environment allowed it.
Rejection, process, and the doors ahead
Sharma’s reflections extend beyond one film. Like most actors, she has lost roles she wanted. Her approach is deliberate: take what can be learned, let it go, and move forward without looking back too long. “If you keep looking back at the doors that didn’t open, you might miss the ones that are opening right in front of you,” she said.
That mix of patience and forward motion is, for actors, a survival skill. The Mumbai audition circuit rewards persistence far more than it does agonising over near-misses. Sharma frames it as trust in timing: roles she has not yet imagined may be the ones that find her.
For Hindi cinema’s audience, the interview offers a useful lens for watching ensemble films. The performances audiences celebrate are often built in rooms where senior actors choose ease over intimidation. Gajab Raat, when it reaches screens, becomes a small case study in that principle: a young actor given room to work, and a veteran who understood that authority need not announce itself.
Source: The Times of India
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