Alia Bhatt talks about being in love, superpowers and her “human-like” cats

Alia Bhatt has always relied on her imagination to spirit her away to other worlds. “As a child, my mind would always be somewhere else, imagining what I want to do, who I want to be,” she says. “In car journeys, I would imagine myself in songs that played on the radio. I created my own worlds.” Professionally, the actor who has played a slew of strong, flawed characters, spent the last few years upping her reality quotient. She threw away her smartphone to get under the skin of Udta Punjab’s lonely Bihari hockey player turned farm labourer struggling with an addiction; and dabbled in Morse code and weapons training for her role as a spy in Raazi.

Ten films and seven years later, at 25 (though she feels 40 at times!) she’s one of the most bankable female stars in Hindi cinema. She has long silenced those who dismissed her as a privileged star kid (production has slowed to a trickle at the Alia Bhatt joke factory). Bhatt says she’s surrounded by people who don’t treat her any differently, but that her success has ensured a clear evolution in the directors she’s working with. “The conversations have become more creative, they’ve moved to understand what’s happening at the box office. When your work is good, people can take that leap of faith with you,” she says. “I also can’t help but notice that I’m working with so many female directors, such as Gauri Shinde, Zoya Akhtar, Meghna Gulzar and Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari,” she adds.

WORK TO PLAY

Coming up next year are Ayan Mukerji’s supernatural/fantasy adventure Brahmastra; Akhtar’s Gully Boy based on the true story of a Mumbai street rapper; and Kalank, a period drama by Abhishek Varman. In 2020—eight years after he gave her her first break—Bhatt will reunite with Karan Johar in Takht. “It’s therapeutic to work with him,” she says of the director who thinks of her as his child. Her imagination quotient gives her a natural advantage in Mukerji’s Brahmastra. “It’s a play of imagination,” she says over the phone from Bulgaria. “It’s my most action-heavy film, but it’s a different kind of organic action, not dishoom-dishoom.” Bhatt and co-star Ranbir Kapoor worked with Ido Portal on movement design or the way they move in the film. (Movement culture essentially involves a combination of yoga, calisthenics, functional training, capoeira and dance to create new, complex movements.)

Bhatt dismisses reports that it’s a superhero film. “If you call it that, then people will imagine us running around the city in red underwear,” she says. But ask her which superpower she would pick, if she could have any, and she instead talks about a universal superpower: “I would want everyone to wake up one day with extreme sensitivity towards our planet.” In fact, the environment and animals keep coming up in our conversation; her three cats are, after all, her children. “They are very human-like, chilled out. You have to work for their love and affection,” she says.

SUGAR & SPICE

“Love is love,” she tweeted about the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Section 377 and decriminalise homosexuality. “I feel very strongly about this,” she says, adding that there should be no boundaries of any kind in love. But unlike her parents Mahesh Bhatt and Soni Razdan, Bhatt never discusses politics publicly. She is the sugar-and-spice anomaly to her father who has the power to look into a person’s eyes and stare into their soul, and her sister Shaheen, who told Vogue earlier this year that she’s lived with depression since she was 12. “I’m fully dysfunctional,” she says, disagreeing with my assessment. “I have my good days and I have my bad days, but I’m not very talkative when it comes to my personal life. I don’t let the world see how curious I am. It’s all neat and clean—for now,” she says. Everyone’s talking about her romance with co-star Ranbir Kapoor, who recently told GQ, “It’s new for us, so let it cook a bit.”

I remind her of her endearing monologue on dating in Dear Zindagi: “Is there someone like the one? What is this perfect one exactly? Mere liye toh koi perfect hona chahiye na.” She says she avoids such questions because she worries that her work and the characters she plays on screen will take a backseat to her love life. “This invariably becomes the headline.” And then she adds, “Yeah, I think I have,” she hints at my previous question. In love, Bhatt says, she’s an “affectionate, beautiful person.” She adds, “I have stars and a halo on my head, and I’m walking around with rainbows. I like to keep it simple and sweet.” The first time she fell in love was in kindergarten. “I was smitten by a boy. We used to look at each other across the class,” she tells me. Bhatt may not put her private life on display, but she also doesn’t actively hide her feelings. “Actors, in general, are very vulnerable. Ours is the life on display for constant judgement. I’m very affected by judgements about my professional life. I even get worked up if my director is stressed about something,” she says. “I can only act in front of one camera.”

Read more in Vogue India’s November 2018 issue that hits stands on November 5, 2018

Photographed by: Bikramjit Bose. Styled by: Anaita Shroff Adajania

Hair: Priyanka Borkar. Makeup: Puneet B Saini. Production: Imran Khatri Productions; Divya Jagwani. Photographer’s assistant: Vikas Gotra. Assistant stylist: Priyanka Kapadia. Editorial assistant: Janine Dubash