Rashmika Mandanna: “I’m the girl who cares more about other people’s feelings than my own”
There’s something incongruous about the way Rashmika Mandanna enters a room. I’ve spent a disproportionate part of my stint in magazines watching celebrities arrive, and every time, you can feel the ions in the air begin to shift even before they’re seen. The agitation in the atmosphere, the quickening of footsteps, conversations tapering into murmurs, attention migrating towards the door. A celebrity brings their own kind of weather to set.
During the cover shoot at Mehboob Studios in Bandra, Mandanna crosses my orbit at least three times before I get a chance to speak to her. She appears first in head-to-toe Gucci beneath a gravity-defying wig, then in pin-straight, jet-black hair, which turns a flaming red for the final look, each iteration seemingly designed to make her more conspicuous than she would like to be. And yet my eyes are drawn to her softly, only once she’s standing directly in front of me.
Mandanna is very good at being seen. She is less good at taking up space. This isn’t about her physical stature—she is even more petite in person than she appears on screen—but about her instinct to be the most accommodating person in the room. She does move with an entourage and other accoutrements of fame, but with every step, Mandanna knows she is the people’s star—a reputation cemented by Geetha Govindam in 2018 and made pan-Indian by Pushpa in 2021—and her unassuming gait and unforced warmth prove it. While everyone is trying to make her larger than life, she seems to fold inward rather than expand. As the styling and glam teams move around her between shots, she answers every passing glance with a wide smile despite being visibly nervous about these experimental looks (“I’m nervous about 80 per cent of the time,” she confides in me later), one hairstyle, in particular: a kind of lopsided beehive. Her reservations, she clarifies, are less about vanity than expectations. “I feel a responsibility to my audience. I don’t want to appear inauthentic or too unfamiliar from what they know me to be and, in the process, disappoint them.”
The fear of disappointing people, it turns out, is a recurring preoccupation for the actor. It is also the reason she struggles to say no. As we exit the studio towards her vanity van, it begins to drizzle. Someone from her team immediately holds an umbrella over her. She yanks me closer, the two of us suddenly huddled beneath it like schoolgirls. “I’m the girl who cares more about other people’s feelings than my own,” she tells me as we talk together. “My mind immediately starts wondering if saying no will make them dislike me, make them uncomfortable, annoyed.” It explains why she’s happy to listen to the photographer even though she knows her angles, offering her ideas only when asked. The set has been transformed into a Rashmika-specific anime reverie: hand-painted clouds populated by crocodiles, fantastical, architectural landscapes that transpose the worlds of her favourite anime into an Indian visual vocabulary. It’s an aesthetic she knows intimately; it has been part of her emotional education since childhood. She discovered Naruto when she was 12 and says it has taught her as much about empathy and perseverance as about the nuances of expression as an actor.
A few days later, I speak with Mandanna after she has completed a full day of shooting in Hyderabad, the city she feels most at home in. It is almost midnight, but she is still in costume, smiling despite being bonetired, revealing another side of her that is less immediately apparent: a kind of dogged stamina. Earlier this year, while shooting a dance sequence for her upcoming film Mysaa, a tendon in her hip detached. She kept shooting until she could no longer lift her leg, and was eventually forced into a break she admits she would never have taken voluntarily. “When I’m in crazy physical pain, I just laugh out loud. I know it sounds strange, but it works for me.” On Instagram, she chronicled the injury with refreshing candour, explaining the anatomy of her hip in painstaking detail, joking about becoming a “dessert monster” without her workouts and discovering, to her surprise, that she was rather good at puzzles.
