Kiara Advani is stepping into a role of her own

Bollywood has always been good at turning actors into memories. A character reminds you of a version of yourself, a song becomes a wedding-season staple, dialogues become inside jokes; and before you know it, the person behind it has become part of the cultural fabric of a particular time. We tend to feel nostalgic about the people we have watched grow up in public, not simply because of the films they made but because of the years those films came to represent. Kiara Advani’s journey has followed that familiar arc, from the girl who audiences first noticed in Fugly (2014), still finding her footing in the strange business of being watched, to the actor who knows her craft in Kabir Singh (2019), Good Newwz (2019), Shershaah (2021) and Satyaprem Ki Katha (2023). There has been no single, defining turn, but a succession of films that have marked different chapters of her career, each one adding to a familiarity that, over time, begins to feel like nostalgia. At 35, Advani has enough distance from the beginning to know what no longer interests her, even if the future remains less certain. “I don’t think of it as a reset as much as an evolution,” she insists. The distinction is telling. Nothing is being discarded. The actor isn’t looking to outrun the person she has been, but to make room for the person she is becoming.

It’s raining in Delhi as I sit down to write this, the kind of sudden downpour that makes a long day feel longer. But there is a particular pleasure in ending one by doing what you love—a feeling like the one Advani describes when she talks about acting. “The only thing that I had absolute clarity in life was wanting to be an actor,” says Advani. The instinct appears to predate the career itself. As far back as she can remember, acting was not one possibility among many. It was the only possibility. There is something almost old-fashioned about the certainty of it. No alternate career to fall back on, no carefully hedged bet. Just the kind of blinkered determination that makes hindsight look inevitable. Advani danced around the house, watched films, recited dialogues from her favourites, came home from school, and watched more films. Her parents noticed it early, though they wanted her to graduate first. So Advani did both. College, exams, and evening classes to hone her craft ran alongside each other. “I’m glad that I went to college. I’m glad that I had that experience as well. And I lived my childhood as well,” Advani adds. The ambition was there, but so was a life outside it.

Perhaps that is why the lesson being learnt now is almost the opposite of the one that got her here. Advani who once planned her way towards a very specific future is trying to become comfortable with not having every detail mapped out. Preparation comes naturally to her, certainty does not. “You can plan everything and still be surprised,” she says. What remains is an attempt to trust the process, be kinder to herself when the answers are not immediate and, as she puts it, “just go with the flow.”

There is a similar refusal to over-engineer the person the audience sees. The public Advani, she says, is not some carefully constructed alter ego. “The Kiara people see is very much a part of who I am.” In private, the scale simply gets smaller. Family, cousins, her husband’s side of the family, holidays, meals, and staying home. “I’m usually quite silly with the people I’m comfortable with,” she reveals. “I don’t feel the need to be ‘on’ all the time.” 

You can tell that the difference becomes clearer once the conversation turns to work. An actor may spend years becoming recognisable, only to discover that such recognition can, in time, prove rather limiting. The business tends to remember what has worked before; audiences hold on to what they once enjoyed. Advani, for her part, appears less concerned with preserving either.

“An actor’s job for me is to surprise people, and sometimes surprise yourself,” she says. “I don’t want to build a box around myself.” The appeal of a difficult role, then, is not simply the role itself but what it might make possible afterwards. “Every challenging role should expand the possibilities of what I can play next.” 

Her recent release Toxic (2026) offered precisely that opportunity. As Nadia, Advani had to inhabit a character that took her into an unusually dark psychological space. The opening scene, in particular, demanded something she describes as moving through guilt, mania, derangement, and a depth of suffering she had never known personally. 

The aftermath is what Advani remembers most clearly. The scene left her physically drained but emotionally lighter. “I had given it my all,” she says. “Even though I was drained, I think it had removed everything that I had.” There was something else about the day that stayed with her: people from production gathering around the monitor to watch the scene. It is an oddly intimate detail from a film set, where hundreds of people can spend hours working around a single performance without necessarily seeing the moment it produces. For Advani, the response became part of the memory.

Nadia is not the only role that has left such a mark. Be it the final scene of Shershaah, where her character confronts the reality of her husband’s death, or the moment Monica and Varun Batra, played by Advani and Akshay Kumar, grapple with the mix-up over their babies in Good Newwz, even the comic sequences in the latter have stayed with her. “Comedy is such a hard genre to do,” she admits. Often, it is a scene rather than an entire film that becomes the thing an actor carries away. The most difficult are usually the ones that require an emotion Advani has never had to live by herself.

That emotional excavation can be exhausting, but experience has also taught her where to draw the line. “When I’m at work, I am fully invested. Home, unless there is preparation to be done, is different. It is where the character stops and I get to recharge. I feel it’s also very important to conserve your energy so that you can give your best.”

It is a thought that stays with me as we talk about the life Advani has stepped into beyond the characters she plays. There is, after all, a new role waiting for her when she gets home, and one she is still learning as she goes. “Your priorities shift, your time shifts, your body changes, your emotions change. There is no single moment when you suddenly know how to do it all. But it is also incredibly beautiful about discovering this new version of yourself. And I’m still figuring her out,” Advani admits. 

It has also sharpened Advani’s understanding of the peculiar demands placed on women. “Motherhood has made me look at women with an even deeper sense of admiration,” she tells me. Nurturing, ambitious, present, successful, graceful, strong: the list can seem endless, and the expectation is often that all of these qualities should coexist without contradiction. “There is no single correct version of motherhood, just as there is no single definition of being a woman. Family and ambition do not have to cancel each other out. Neither does love require the disappearance of identity,” she adds.

Advani’s insistence that love need not come at the expense of the self recalls a similar reckoning in literature. In Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening, Edna Pontellier draws a distinction between what she is willing to surrender for her children and what she considers indivisible from her own identity: “I would give up the unessential...but I wouldn’t give myself.” More than a century later, the sentiment retains its force—the idea that motherhood may demand sacrifice, but need not require a woman to relinquish the self entirely.

For Saraayah, her daughter, the hope is consequently less about following in her mother’s footsteps than having the freedom to choose her own. Advani wants her daughter to dream as big as she wants while remaining grounded and compassionate. “I want her to be kind and strong. To know her worth without needing the world to confirm it. Most of all, to understand that she does not have to fit into anyone else’s definition of who she should be.

At home, there is the additional complexity of raising a child when both parents can have peculiar work hours. Two actors know what an early call time looks like, what happens when a shoot takes over a day, and why work can suddenly become all-consuming. 

“I think it gives us a very unique understanding of each other’s worlds,” Advani says. There is no claim to having solved the equation. “There’s no perfect formula. Instead, there is communication, adjustment, and, occasionally, laughter at the chaos.”

The same groundedness appears in Advani’s idea of solitude. Me time, for most people, might mean dinner somewhere nice, a spa appointment, a holiday, some deliberate effort to step away from the everyday routine. For the star, it is deliberately unglamorous. Home. A phone switched off. Family or friends dropping by. Something to watch, something to listen to, or nothing at all. “Sometimes it is simply an hour in which nobody needs anything from you. And that feels like a luxury right now,” she says. 

I underline that sentence in my notes twice. Not because it’s a revelation—every working parent alive would nod along—but because it’s rare to hear an actor admit that the luxury they crave is just silence. 

The idea of leaving room for oneself extends, too, to the way Advani dresses. Fashion, for her, is increasingly less about the performance of being fashionable. “My personal style has become much more instinctive with time. I’d rather take a trend and make it my own than wear something just because it’s having a moment,” she quips. 

There is an admission, though, that trends have a way of returning, including the ones you once dismissed entirely. The final test remains simple: if the clothes are wearing you, rather than the other way around, something has gone wrong, she tells me. 

It is a useful measure for a career, too. After years of being watched and boxed into familiar categories, evolution isn’t about becoming someone new—it’s about losing interest in performing a version of yourself that no longer fits. “I would rather try than not try at all,” the actor makes a point.

All images: Bikramjit Bose

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