Sobhita Dhulipala’s entry into films did not follow the usual insider script. In an interview with GQ India, the actor said her pageant and modelling credentials, far from being a shortcut, were often used against her.
A title that cut both ways
Dhulipala moved from Visakhapatnam to Mumbai for college while modelling. She won the Miss India Earth title in 2013 expecting it to lead to runway work and eventually films. Instead, she said, the pageant background was held against her at runway auditions, and the model tag became a disadvantage in film auditions.
“I didn’t have a godfather or a godmother coming to save me,” Dhulipala said.
That line matters because it reframes the insider-outsider debate: even highly visible credentials are not the same as access. An outsider, she explained, is left with “no knowledge or guidance” and has to work out the industry alone.
The break, and the unlearning
What finally converted effort into entry was volume: she recalled going to many auditions until Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 gave her a debut alongside Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Vicky Kaushal. The 2016 film also took her to Cannes.
The larger shift, she said, was giving up the need for external approval. Once she saw the industry as a “circus” full of creative people, the realisation that “anyone can do anything” set her free. That lesson, she said, takes “courage, work and time.”
An outsider filmography
- 2016: Debuts in Raman Raghav 2.0 and attends Cannes.
- 2019: Wider recognition as Tara Khanna in Amazon Prime Video’s Made in Heaven.
- 2024: Hollywood debut in Dev Patel’s Monkey Man, followed by the Hindi film Love, Sitara.
Between those markers, she built a cross-language record: Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi releases, and series such as Bard of Blood and The Night Manager. For readers who follow Hindi cinema’s long-running nepotism conversation, that track is the rebuttal by doing.
For actors in the same position, the takeaway is practical: make auditions the credential, not the missing godfather, and treat validation as separate from work. That, Dhulipala suggests, is a slower route, but it is the one that compounds.
Source: Hindustan Times
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