In her 20s, Pallavi Sharda conquered Bollywood. Now, she’s home, and on a mission

She’s late, she has “ocean hair” scraped into a bun, she’s bare-faced – and she’s still impossible to ignore. Pallavi Sharda arrives on Zoom 10 minutes behind schedule, fresh from a swim at Perth’s Cottesloe Beach. Under her zip-up hoodie “I’m totally naked – I was hoping to be a little bit more put together”, she says, equal parts apologetic and at ease.

It’s that magnetism that’s carried the 2015 Queen of Moomba (Shane Warne was King) from classical Indian dance classes in suburban Melbourne to Netflix’s glossy romcom Wedding Season and, in between, the achievement that still makes headlines: becoming Australia’s first Bollywood leading lady.

No easy feat in Mumbai, where an estimated thousand newcomers arrive daily chasing stardom. Sharda cracked it, then left it, and has been in motion ever since. “I’m a gypsy by nature,” she says. But for all the red carpets, airport lounges and a house in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, the idea of her true home is simple: “When I’m on the couch and my mum’s giving me a steaming cup of chai.”

The 33-year-old is talking to Sunday Life ahead of her Stan Original movie, One More Shot. The film takes you back to a party on New Year’s Eve 1999, when a time-travelling bottle of tequila gives Minnie (Emily Browning) the power to alter her life’s actions and outcomes.

Sharda plays Minnie’s friend Pia, a woman with a husband, baby, career in IT and nearly $2 million in cash in a bag in the wardrobe of her stonking designer house. But Pia also has that familiar itch so many women know: the sense that even when we have everything, it’s not quite enough.

Sharda “had to go future tense” for the role of a career woman mum “because I’m not there in my own life”, she says. “But I drew inspiration from friends with kids, and my own mother, who was a professor and high achiever. That sense of restlessness, of trying to be good and worthy and live up to the migrant dream your parents have had for you – it’s a lot of pressure.”

At the Melbourne premiere, women approached her to say Pia’s angst was super-relatable. “That was my aim,” she says. “To honour the tension so many women deal with – the outward silhouette, the perfection expected of us versus the messiness inside.”

Signing up for One More Shot was “an energetic thing”, she says. “Doing something in Melbourne was really exciting. Normally, I’m the kooky Australian voice in my head while the chaos of set goes on. This time, I was surrounded by people who spoke the same language.”

Scanlan Theodore singlet, Matteau pants, Jimmy Choo shoes. Credit: Hugh Stewart

Sharda also loved that director Nicholas Clifford gave her the opportunity to “clown” – she’s dressed as Fran Drescher from the 1990s TV series The Nanny throughout – plus “the subliminal messaging of a South Asian woman among those faces – it’s really important”.

If Sharda was handed the transformational tequila bottle, what would she change? “Great question,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s a do-over or a quiet curiosity about what my life and career would have been, if it would have even existed, had I not run away to India when I was 18 years old.”

At three, she’d told her parents she was going to be a Bollywood star, transfixed by the DVDs her film-buff dad kept at home.

Acne Studios suit, Scanlan Theodore shoes. Credit: Hugh Stewart

She pauses. “I think there was an inevitability to it, and I was so curious about this childhood fantasy and would have remained maybe a little bit regretful had I not chased it. But I certainly feel like I missed a big chunk of early adulthood here in the place I grew up.”

Born in Perth to computer engineer parents who’d migrated from India, Sharda grew up in Melbourne’s north-west. Years of classical Indian dance training became her first passport to entertainment, but she had more than eye-catching moves.

Sir dress, Jimmy Choo shoes.Credit: Hugh Stewart

Intellectually gifted, she skipped year 9 and at 16 started a double arts/law degree at the University of Melbourne. But performing kept calling her. She fibbed to her parents about a uni exchange program to Mumbai, and at 21 graduated with honours while filming a Bollywood movie in Punjab.

Her first role was a cameo in the 2010 film My Name Is Khan. Two years later she was the lead in the stage musical Taj Express, and her breakthrough screen role was in 2013’s Besharam. She played opposite Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman in 2016’s Lion and received critical acclaim as a sex worker in Begum Jaan (2017).

At a time when the Bollywood casting couch was “open and explicit”, as she’s called it, Sharda says “the Australian in me” helped. “I was potentially more guarded than I needed to be in some circumstances, but it was a guessing game. I really had no idea what I was doing.”

With all that success, why did she walk away from Bollywood? First, she wanted to stay true to the social agenda she champions, a struggle when she had a “phenomenally privileged life” in a country of one billion people, many without the same advantages: “There’s a dissonance there that I couldn’t shake at a very fundamental level.”

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Ultimately, she decided the biggest contribution she could make towards “normalising brown people on screen” was “by being on screen for Western audiences. So I think I was walking towards something – being able to be a brown international actress from Australia.”

Done. Global opportunities came thick and fast. She earned the Casting Guild of Australia’s Rising Star award in 2017 for the ABC medical drama Pulse, starred in Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha’s historical TV drama series Beecham House, and earned a Logie nomination for Australian drama The Twelve.

Everything she’s done has been “very mission-based”, says Sharda. “There’s sort of an anthropology going on behind the scenes. It’s my lived experience to be not quite sure where I fit in, and I really do want to alleviate that angst for anyone else as much as I can.”

It’s my lived experience to be not quite sure where I fit in, and I really do want to alleviate that angst for anyone else.

Where does she belong now? “On country in Australia, when I am in nature. When I’m dancing, meditating. When I’m laughing with people in a dark theatre. On a plane. We’re all living in a very odd push-and-pull identity time. Belonging is such a strange thing.”

Named one of the 40 most influential Asian Australians in 2020, Sharda these days sits on the Screen Australia board and runs Bodhini Studios, developing projects centred around South Asian women, including a series that ties to a memoir she’s writing. Shaping the change she once dreamed about feels “like a real exhale”, she says. “I feel very honoured, very cognisant of the responsibility.”

But it’s personal too: “I wouldn’t be an artist if it wasn’t for the elders I learnt from, the small community halls they would gather and perform in that were spaces for sharing and storytelling. I want there to be a stamp for that community and its pioneers.”

Away from work, Sharda is dedicated to sustainable fashion, loves a deep yoga practice and is having a “masc” moment with her personal style, often borrowing coats from her dad and always wearing cotton drawstring pyjamas and sneakers on planes.

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She’s in a relationship but won’t spill much for now. “It’s really lovely, very new,” she says, adding her man will be “very happy” to be “hard launched” here. “I found a really lovely person who seems to so far be very understanding of my crazy life.”

Next up: Sharda wants to keep encouraging young brown women to connect to their heritage through language and, “oh my gosh, hopefully some really funny stuff comes out of Bodhini Studios and really reverses the gaze of what is ‘other’”.

She smiles one last time, with that same unvarnished magnetism. “And who knows? Maybe Bollywood disco nights in a Fitzroy community hall.”

The Stan Original film One More Shot premieres October 12, only on Stan.