Anjali Sivaraman dreams of playing Catwoman, starring in a One Piece movie, even acting as the unhinged main character in a psychological thriller. But so far, the 31-year-old actor hasn’t done too badly. She’s played an ethical hacker, a gaming prodigy, a small-town rebel, and a rebellious teen maturing into a sober adult.
Sivaraman’s rise has come in bursts and spurts. She started off as an assistant music producer in 2016, and worked her way up from getting cast in ads for beauty products, beverages and phones, to side-hustling as a lead vocalist in the indie Mumbai band, Gloss. She also beat 100 contenders to play the legendary painter Amrita Sher-Gil in Mira Nair’s 2027 biopic, Amri. So, how did she land up here?
Find the light
Sivaraman grew up in a film-loving Tamil family. They’d huddle around the TV, all four of them – dad Vinod, an Indian Air Force pilot; mum Chitra Iyer, a playback singer, and her sister Aditi, who’s now a filmmaker. “My earliest memories are about just watching films and being mesmerised by the drama, romance or action on screen,” Sivaraman recalls. Her parents love to recount the story of how she’d come up to them and ask them to watch Alien (1979) over and over. Her first movie crush: Jack Dawson from Titanic (1997). “You could just see the love in his eyes. I remember going, ‘Wow, how do you do that with your eyes and your body?’,” she recalls. “I used to be so convinced that everything on screen was real, that it was an alternate universe.”
Because her father’s job postings changed every two years, the family moved from Coimbatore to Allahabad and then Ooty, before eventually settling in Bengaluru. “There were all these beautiful Air Force Stations, and it was where I’d get lost in my daydreams of becoming an actor,” she says. Because her mother sang in films, “there was always this sense of ‘I’m going to do something in the arts’”.
So, Sivaraman went to London to pursue a diploma in art, design, and communication in 2013. She returned to Mumbai to a harsh reality: Landing even a minor acting role is tough. “All the auditions I’d done had fallen through,” she says. “Rejection got to me. I started to think I simply didn’t have the kind of looks for the big screen.”
She’d almost given up, when a friend encouraged her to audition for a phone ad in 2016. Sivaraman was hustling as an assistant music producer then, and walked in to the casting after work, hair frizzy, sweaty and nervous. “I took one look at all the beautiful women in the room and thought there’s no way I was going to land the part. Oddly, my inhibitions just faded away and I gave it my all.” It’s exactly what landed her the part opposite Ranveer Singh. The ad was a hit. She’s become known as the Selfie Girl. “My time had come.”
Make it matter
Ad agencies and modelling services came calling. Sivaraman walked for Tarun Tahiliani and Sabyasachi. In 2022, she was cast as athletic, tomboyish Anuja in Sachin Kundalkar’s queer romance, Cobalt Blue, a story of two siblings who both fall in love with the paying guest staying in their house. She give it her all – living in character, adopting a more masculine body language, learning to play hockey. “I needed to speak in a deeper register, move like an athlete, and speak Malayalam,” says Sivaraman. “It taught me how to become someone else when you’re acting.”
There’s a pattern to the characters Sivaraman finds herself playing. In the Netflix web series Class (2023), she played wealthy, troubled Suhani Ahuja, who’s drawn to bad company even as she resists her family’s corrupt dealings. In the 2025 Tamil coming-of-age film Bad Girl, she is stubborn, rebellious Ramya, who’s actually just a lover-girl at heart. The film, which was directed by Varsha Bharath, received backlash for showing a young woman making her own choices in love. In one scene, Ramya lashes out at her mother, who’s transferring her to a new school because Ramya was caught having an “affair” with a boy. And yet, later, she realises that her mother was just pushing her to live a better life than her own. “It’s a girl’s girl kind of film. It embraces messiness rather than judging it.” It reminded her of the fights she’d have with her parents when things didn’t go her way, or how she’d chase after relationships even if they were toxic.
Stretch out
Still, landing the part of India’s best known woman artist, in a film directed by someone who discovered Irrfan, Tillotama Shome and Nana Patekar, is a huge deal. It fits exactly into the kind of characters Sivaraman wants to play – women who are talented and loveable, even if they mess up or hurt themselves and others in the process of figuring out who they want to be. Sher-Gil, who died 1941, aged 28, was expelled from Catholic school for declaring herself atheist. She had to work against her family’s affluence and her Indo-Hungarian heritage to paint women as she saw them. Her letters reveal that she had same-sex affairs, and she may have died from a failed abortion.
In 2023, Sher-Gil’s 1937 painting The Story Teller fetched $7.4 million on auction. It was the highest price achieved by an Indian artist at the time. “I’ve never been particularly drawn to roles where a woman exists purely as part of a man’s storyline. You don’t see enough women characters that are aspirational for women,” she says.
From HT Brunch, June 27, 2026
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