Rashmika Mandanna has built a career across Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi cinema, but the judgement that once silenced her in a Coorg boarding school didn’t stay in her school years. In a new conversation with Prakhar Gupta, she draws a straight line from that classroom to the trolling that followed Animal.
Mandanna was sent to hostel at four. Asked something in English, she went “mum”: “I didn’t know. It was terrible, I couldn’t communicate in English.” By the time she finished Class 10, she says, classmates had already made up their minds. “No matter how much you speak in English, people already think ‘You are lesser than us,’” she recalled.
She deliberately does not call that experience bullying. She calls it “cornering”—the pressure to match other students’ traditions so nobody would call her uncool. What stayed with her, she says, was the survival instinct: learn to read the room and smile through discomfort.
The same judgement, from school to set
- Sent to a Coorg boarding school at four; froze when questioned in English.
- By Class 10, she felt classmates had already decided she was “lesser”.
- The 2023 Animal trailer turned one of her scenes into meme material.
- On set, the full nine-minute scene drew applause.
The criticism grew loudest after Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal. When the trailer released in 2023, her dialogue with Ranbir Kapoor became a social-media talking point, and a clip quickly travelled as a meme. The reaction continued after release, especially around the Karwa Chauth confrontation.
Mandanna remembers a very different room. The scene ran about nine minutes, and people on set clapped. “I did the nine-minute long scene and everyone on the set liked it, but people now are trolling me for the same. So am I living in a bubble?” she said. The question was not rhetorical, and it points to what makes her account useful: she wanted to understand how audiences actually received the work.
Vijay Deverakonda, speaking in the same conversation, described the reverse boarding-school arc. He spent the years from six to fifteen in a boys’ school with little exposure to girls or television, and for two years after returning home he didn’t speak to a girl at all. Both actors say those early years shaped how they deal with public life; Mandanna’s carries an extra edge because language has followed her everywhere.
Why the accent question matters
Accent has long been a shortcut for belonging in Indian cinema—it can mark region, class or where a performer is supposed to be from. For an industry now selling pan-India reach, Mandanna’s story asks a difficult question: why is a shared screen moment so easily reduced to a few seconds of delivery?
She is not arguing that she should be above criticism. The distinction she draws is narrower: it is one thing to judge a complete performance, and another to let a viral clip stand in for it. That is the real wound—not the accent itself, but the assumption that it makes her “lesser” before the work is seen whole.
Source: India Weekly
Comments