Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt on Netflix film Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot, her Hollywood debut, and why friend Priyanka Chopra is ‘brave’
- Alia Bhatt, a Bollywood star with nearly 79 million Instagram followers and a decade’s worth of acting experience, has made her Hollywood debut on Netflix
- She talks about how ‘your first film chooses you’, growing up in a Bollywood family and why Priyanka Chopra is ‘an inspiration to every young girl from India’
Alia Bhatt had been weighing her Hollywood options for a few years. A popular star of Hindi films for over a decade with nearly 79 million Instagram followers, she had been interested in making an English-language film, but nothing had been working out.
“Your first film chooses you,” says Bhatt. “Technically, this is my first English-language movie. It chose me and I’m so happy it did.”
Heart of Stone, a globe-trotting spy thriller co-starring Gadot and Jamie Dornan, debuts globally on August 11 on Netflix. Bhatt’s role as a tech prodigy named Keya is one that is hard to describe without spoiling the twisty plot, but it is an important one.
In India, the actress had grown accustomed to being a lead, but here she was happy to delve into a more supporting part – as long as it had substance to it.
In reading the script, she wanted to make sure that her character was not just there to fill a “South Asian” slot, and that she was involved in – and impacted – the storyline.
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“The way I judge it is if you take the character out of the story and you still have a film, then that character’s not important,” Bhatt says.
But most of all, she was excited to be second to a woman who was also producing. Director Tom Harper called Bhatt a “formidable talent” and says that it was the dynamic between Keya and Gadot’s character, Rachel Stone, that most excited him about the film.
“The two bounce off each other brilliantly and you get real electricity,” Harper says. “Some of my favourite parts of the movie are when they riff off each other and the banter that they have.”
Bhatt was struck by how similar Hollywood sets are to the ones she has spent a decade on in India – with the main difference being the hours. The days were shorter on Heart of Stone, but so were the breaks. In India, she says, there would be an hour for lunch, 30 minutes for snacks and a later finish time.
She was also pregnant during the shoot and was tickled to see some of the things she “did” in the finished film – with the help of stunt doubles and digital effects.
“I’m like, ‘Wow, I did that?’” she says with a laugh. “I don’t think so, but it looks like I did.”
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The release of Heart of Stone caps off what has been a banner year for the 30-year-old, in which she also welcomed her first child, attended her first Met Gala and was named the first Indian house ambassador for the luxury label Gucci.
The first film she produced, Darlings, was a Netflix production as well, and the experience has been “challenging and scary and fruitful all at the same time”.
“My parents from the very beginning have been very careful with the words of encouragement that they give me … it helps when you grow up in a family that’s seen the highs and the lows and seen everything in between,” she says.
“At the end of the day, my dad always says, you most definitely cannot be the first member of your own fan club. So, try to have a 10-foot distance from it all.”
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“I think what Priyanka did was extremely brave and very different from what anyone has ever done. She’s such an inspiration to every young girl from India that has that big dream to be a global icon and a global star,” Bhatt says.
“I don’t think I could do that. I want to continue to do movies in India. And I want to be able to get these one-off, amazing international opportunities.”
“I still don’t know what I’m doing,” she adds. “It’s just this one film and we’ll see how it goes from here.”
