A star is born: Shriya Pilgaonkar’s shining take-off performance

Her surname might be popular in the Marathi film industry, and she might have grown up in the lap of cinema, with her parents Sachin and Supriya Pilgaonkar being established actors in the industry. But Shriya Pilgaonkar, for the larger part of her growing years, focused almost entirely on sports — especially swimming. The 29-year-old, who was last seen in Amazon Prime’s much-talked-about series Mirzapur, as Sweety, used to be a state-level swim champ, we learn, over the course of a phone conversation. Shriya is currently in  Kerala shooting  for director Prabhu Solomon’s trilingual film starring Rana Daggubati — Haathi Mere Saathi (Hindi), Kaadan (Tamil) and Aranya (Telugu).

Playing it right 

The Mumbai-born actress says that her progression from sports to films was organic. She started off as a child actor in her mother’s TV show Tu Tu Main Main (1994). It was in 2012 at the Short + Sweet Festival when she did a 10-minute play called Freedom To Love, that she realised that acting was her calling. “I spent about a month rehearsing, and it just felt very right. I had endless conversations with my father, so cinema was never a new world for me. My training in Kathak drew me to acting as well,” she explains.

Papa, don’t preach

Shriya made her debut as an actress in the Marathi film Ekulti Ek (2013), directed by and starring her father, that portrays a beautiful father-daughter relationship. However, Shriya admits that she was initially apprehensive about signing a film with her father. “Dad saw me act for the first time as an adult when he and mum came to see Freedom to Love. He really liked my performance. He told me that he was working on a father-daughter film and wanted to cast me as the daughter, and asked me to take a call after reading the script. I think that was the director in him talking,” she says. She goes on to add that she felt she would be judged, for having the perfect launch pad, so to speak. “That is when mum stepped in and told me to treat it as an opportunity and show people that I was deserving of the role by doing a good job,” says Shriya, who won six awards including the Maharashtra State Government Award for Best Debut Actress.

Elephant in the room

In the trilingual film, which is about the relationship between a man and his elephant, Shriya (who reportedly replaced Kalki Koechlin) plays a journalist. So did she get to work with actual elephants? “On the first day, there was an elephant on the set that I was doting over completely, even though I didn’t have any scene with him,” says the actress. In fact, a few months ago, after she had wrapped up the shoot of Beecham House, a period British drama, directed by Gurinder Chadha, her co-star Lesley Nicol (of Downton Abbey fame) gave her a poster of an elephant. “I put it up on my soft board, and I when woke up it was the first thing I’d see. When this film came my way, I took it as a sign that it was something that I had to do,” signs off Shriya.