Steel Magnolia

She is a performer in the classical sense of the word. A dancer and an actor of screen and stage, Radhika Apte is committed to her craft and rewriting the rules of what it means to be a Bollywood star.

- Supriya Nair

THERE’S SOMETHING UNBENDING ABOUT RADHIKA APTE. It’s in the unforgettable opening shot of Lust Stories, last year’s big Netflix conversation piece: On a late night, floodlit by Mumbai’s fuzzy streetlamps, she emerges from a dinky black and yellow taxi, leaning out of the window. Her back is straight, shoulders thrown back. It isn’t a post of girlish excitement. She looks like the Winged Victory.

It’s the danseuse in her, you realise in person. She arrives on location at the Harper’s Bazaar shoot in Kolhapuri chappals and an olive-coloured shirt dress. She’s light on her feet but upright; centred, as the historian Jennifer Homans once explained about dancers, as though “a plumb line were dropped from the crown of the head down through the spine”.

Apte has had six releases in fewer than 12 months. Some of them have been huge hits. In 2018, she was a spy (Sacred Games), a corporate high-flier (Baazaar), a college lecturer on the verge of a meltdown (Lust Stories), and a cop in a torture cell (Ghoul), among other things. She generated her own force field of stardom in an Akshay Kumar vehicle (Padman) and an Ayushmann Khurrana hit (Andhadhun) respectively, holding her own opposite two of Hindi cinema’s most bankable male stars.

You don’t see that she’s a student of kathak and a trained contemporary dancer from her movies. She doesn’t do the nritya-nayika, item-bomb stuff on screen, although women have historically derived a great deal of importance from these roles in Hindi cinema. “I actually haven’t danced in four years,” she says, taking a seat for hair and makeup. (Back: Still straight.) “I used to go to classes, but things have been crazy.”