Athiya Shetty is in no rush to return to cinema

“I will not do anything that doesn’t feel TRUE to me. While that has been my  PERSONAL stance, I don’t think that’s always a GOOD thing because I feel sometimes you need to take RISKS in life. But with that said, I don’t have any REGRETS. By saying no on some fronts, I only said YES to my HAPPINESS, sanity, and PEACE OF MIND in the long run.”

A solid 10 minutes before our scheduled chat, Athiya Shetty joins our Zoom link. There is an initial 10-second pause as I gather my wits, before blurting out what I hope was an audible greeting. The 33-year-old actor, who joins me from her Mumbai home a week before her Scorpio birthday, then proceeds to profusely apologise for keeping her video off owing to a recurrent cervical spasm that has been troubling her for more than a month.

It is a surprisingly candid admission for a talent to make, especially today when most writers like myself are fighting with our lives to have a few minutes (audio or visual) with the celebrities we are due to profile. More than the admission itself, it is Shetty’s need to explain herself and put me at immediate ease right off the bat that catches me off guard.

Yes, Koffee With Karan might be in its ninth season, but if the past three episodes of this swansong season are any proof, then the days of exhilarating immediacy, intimacy, and honesty that we grew up expecting of our celluloid stars (remember the back-lit, golden fluorescence of Rendezvous with Simi?) are an absolute thing of the past. Armed with press teams, a rehearsed media-training plan, and a public image strategy, celebrities today are far from honest; instead they are a blasé mix of political correctness that peddles authenticity as an adopted summer tan rather than an actual ingrained personality trait.

In this strange world of curated celebrity image construction, Shetty is refreshingly and genuinely unguarded. Her answers are slow, admissions of mistakes are made with ingenuousness, and reflections come parsed with a meandering criticality that is punctuated with the most natural of pauses (“I don’t know what phase of my life I am in, professionally, and I am okay with that,” she says at one point). Much like us ordinary mortals, her sentences build up to a crescendo and are punctuated with a pause before culminating in an adorably anticlimactic summation: “As clichéd as it sounds, what I am in life right now is (pause) just very content.”

“I do want to return to cinema, but it has to be with a project that makes me wake up in the morning and really want to go to work.”

It is a writer’s worst transcript nightmare come to life, but a jaded journalist’s much-needed restoration of faith in the state of affairs.

Coming from a cinematic lineage, for Shetty the question of her voice is less an abstraction than a working method. “Ever since I was young, I’ve always been able to listen to my voice and be authentic to myself,” she says. “At a very young age, I was very certain of what I wanted to do and what I didn’t want to do.” Around her, there was no shortage of instruction: be seen more, be out more, take this meeting, attend that party, make the film that leads to the next one. But all through it, her counterphilosophy of “less is more” continued to hold the fort

With just a hint of nostalgia, Shetty speaks of growing up near, but never inside, cinema. Her father, the veteran actor Suniel Shetty, came to acting almost by accident, and the family’s world, she says, was defined by his coming and going to “regular work” rather than by sets and screenings. Despite summer holidays often spent in the Swiss Alps, Shetty is very clear on their intentions. “We went because my father would be on some film set, but it was never because we wanted to see filming. It was always just about us as a family, and our need to spend time together.”

As a parent today, it is this detachment from the trappings of the celluloid world that Shetty values the most. “Now that I am a mother, I understand how my parents never let the success or failure of a Friday ever come home to us. We [her brother Ahaan Shetty and she] were able to be children without the baggage of who my father was,” she reflects. “I think that’s one of his [her father’s] greatest successes: to not carry work home.”

While a full-blown career in films was not a thought that crossed Shetty’s mind well into her late teenage years, acting was something that always gave her a deep sense of joy. She took up drama as a subject in high school and amply enjoyed performing on stage. “I hated everything that came with it, though,” she quickly adds in an undertone. Despite multiple trysts with Shakespeare in those years, the bard’s works never managed to leave an impact on her. “The language always felt very distant, and I never ended up connecting to it,” she admits. “What always fascinated me though was the act of acting itself, irrespective of what it was that I was performing.”

Following a liberal arts education in New York, with a focus on film-making, she returned to Mumbai to make her silver-screen debut in Nikhil Advani’s Hero (2015) at the age of 23. A remake of Subhash Ghai’s 1983 film of the same name, it gave us a viral title track and a promising fresh face in Shetty. But unlike many of her female contemporaries, Shetty’s career in the aftermath of the release was far from an overnight, meteoric success story.

Looking back, Shetty says: “I made a lot of mistakes. In those first few years I declined many things, and now I wonder about my motive behind it.” Fear of failure, she suggests, played its part, and so did a need for perfectionism that was entirely her own. “I have very high expectations of myself.” Whether the result is good, bad, or ugly, Shetty has no space for romanticising it. “I will not do anything that doesn’t feel true to me,” she says firmly. “While that has been my personal stance, I don’t think that’s always a good thing because I feel sometimes you need to take risks in life. But with that said, I don’t have any regrets. By saying no on some fronts, I only said yes to my happiness, sanity, and peace of mind in the long run.”

In the years that Shetty has been away from the silver screen (her last project was opposite Nawazuddin Siddiqui in the 2019 film Motichoor Chaknachoor), she has finally started watching films again, not as a creative but as a member of the audience. It is a detachment that has only made her perceptions about her place in, and expectations of, the industry sharper. “In the coming years, I have only one motto: I do not want to do something unless it excites me. I do want to return to cinema, but at the same time it has to be with a project that makes me wake up in the morning and really want to go to work.” As someone who hates being put in boxes, Shetty frankly admits to there being no dream role in the pipeline. Neither is there a wishlist of dream directors or co-stars. Today, all she wants as a creative is to be challenged and for a role to “shake me up and make me go like, ‘oh wow, this is gonna be hard’.”

“I made a lot of mistakes. In those first few years I declined many things, and now I wonder about my motive behind it.”

It has been more than three years since she married her husband, KL Rahul, former captain of the Indian cricket team. The shift in Shetty’s voice when she speaks of Rahul registers that theirs is a marriage built on equal grounds of mutual respect, friendship, and romance. A quick look at the comments section of the couple’s respective Instagram’s shows the quiet, yet consistently public ways in which they both show up to support each other through thick and thin (in 2026, the year of two Austen adaptations, it is indeed the small gestures of romance that truly count). Although she now admits to understanding the technicalities of cricket better than before (Test cricket, she shares, is her favourite game to watch), Rahul is the one person with whom, Shetty admits, she can be her truest self.

But even three years later, what strikes her the most about him is his sense of constancy. “He is somebody who is the same when it comes to failure and success. I wish I had his patience.” His discipline, she notes, is quiet: the training, the second workout, the shoot, all of it carried out quietly. “I think it’s because he loves doing what he does. He is amazing with our daughter as well, and I think he was always meant to be a dad.”

Motherhood, Shetty explains, has been nothing short of an apprenticeship. Her daughter Evaara, who celebrated her birthday a week before, is beginning to speak, and Shetty is struck by the clarity of a child’s character: “how fearless they are, how honest they are, how pure they are.” Her days now have a shape that involves taking Evaara to playschool each morning and doing the pickup; rituals she once watched her mother perform. “It’s come full circle,” she says.

And while sleep is a rare luxury with a one-year-old running around the length and breadth of the house, Shetty still has a few precious hours to spend dreaming. At the top of that list is a deep, ardent desire to “fall in love with something new professionally, with fire in my belly to continue wanting to be and do more.” No rush, though. With a career as calibrated as hers, Shetty has never needed to fill a silence, and the next act can wait until it’s worth it.

Editor: Rasna Bhasin (@rasnabhasin)
Photographer: Rachel Pachuau (@ruatpuii)
Stylist: Gopalika Virmani (@gopalikavirmani)
Interview: Anwesh Banerjee (@anwesh_writes)
Cover Design: Mandeep Singh Khokhar (@mandy_khokhar19)
Make-up Artist: Riddhima Sharma Khubchandani (@byriddhima), at Entourage Talent Management
Hair Artist: Kritika Gill (@kritikagill), at The Artists Project
Editorial Coordinator: Shalini Kanojia (@shalinikanojia)
Assistant Stylist: Selchi Chakma (@selchich)
Assistant Photographer: Varad Gundewad (@varad.motion_)
Location Courtesy: Jaipur Rugs Mumbai Gallery (@jaipurrugs), Lower Parel

Athiya is wearing a half-zipped turtleneck from the Cruise 2027 collection; a long blazer with rounded lapels from the Cruise 2027 collection; pop pink straight-cut jeans; Romy flat ballerinas; and Nanogram enamel earrings, all by Louis Vuitton.

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