Saiyaara actress Aneet Padda celebrates her 23rd birthday on October 14.
As the actress turns a year older, Namrata Thakker lists down things you probably still don't know about her, in her own words.
Aneet can be cute -- and corny! -- very easily.
In a recent interview to Vogue magazine, she said, 'I'm just too cheesy as a person. The world could use more of it.'
Aneet was over the moon when her idol Alia Bhatt couldn't stop gushing about Saiyaara on social media and also on a personal phone call. She tells Cosmopolitan magazine that it meant the world to her because: 'I would talk to myself in the bathroom mirror (when I was young) and practise Alia's monologues, thinking, 'How can I do it?' and then, 'How can I do it my way?''
Recalling the last day of the Saiyaara shoot, Aneet tells The Hollywood Reporter, 'We were both crying on the last day of shoot. Everyone kept saying, 'There's so much more to do, you guys are going to have cover shoots and things to do after this, you will meet.' But the point was, what we were doing for this whole year, that's over.'
'I always wanted to act. I would be recording auditions and locking my door, telling my parents I was doing homework. I knew I'd have to do this on my own because my parents didn't have enough money to take me to Mumbai to audition,' she says about her journey.
But Aneet wasn't always this confident about her acting career.
'For the longest time I told myself, 'You are so silly for even wanting to do anything about this'. I stopped dreaming for a while,' she says.
In fact, Aneet wasn't sure she would make it in the industry even after doing several commercials and two big projects Salaam Venky with Kajol and Amazon Prime Series, Big Girls Don't Cry.
'I started enjoying acting with this film (Saiyaara). For three years before that, I had terrible anxiety and depression, mostly because I had gone to Delhi to study, not fully being sure if I'd make it anywhere in the industry at all.'
Talking about Saiyaara, Aneet says the film is close to her heart for a personal reason.
'My dadu has Alzheimer's disease, which is why the film was even more emotional for me. He's at a point now where he doesn't remember most things, but I believed in this film because it says 'dimaag bhool jaata hai par dil kabhi nahi bhoolta (the mind forgets but the heart does not)', and that's very true for my dadu as well.'
After a lot of struggle, Aneet is clear that she's here to stay.
'With Saiyaara, I started enjoying the craft so much more because that's when I felt a sense of safety, and thought 'ab main sirf acting kar sakti hu (I can just focus on acting now).'
Aneet always wanted to be a YRF heroine but it wasn't a cake walk.
'I googled some weird acting agencies, which were total scams. Then COVID happened, so self-taping was a thing, and I called maybe 75 agencies. With this film, I thought, 'Okay, I've got a YRF film. I don't have to worry anymore because this was all that I've ever wanted.' I wanted to be a Yash Raj heroine all my life.'
Apart from acting, the young actress is also into music. She's a singer and songwriter.
'It's not something I would pursue professionally because it's my escape, I don't want to monetise that. I'd put it out there at some point, of course. I would love to do film scoring; that's something I'm very interested in, but acting is my first love and that's never going to change.'
Photographs curated by Satish Bodas/Rediff
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