Rehearsing life with Rukmini Vasanth

The internet has its own weather, and tonight, in Bengaluru, the signal is stormy. Rukmini Vasanth has a slightly swollen eye and is, perversely, grateful for the pirated texture of the video which lends our conversation the grain of an early 2000s home video. Coincidentally, she is describing an analogue life, calling her notebook “an introvert’s shield.” Which makes me imagine a leather-bound, sturdy thing. It is always on her or tucked into her assistant’s bag, and contains dialogues, drawings, and small finds from the sets. It is also, occasionally, a way of making friends. Whenever there is a child on set, she finds herself walking over with the notebook, offering a pencil, asking them to draw something, drawing them back, and before long the two are hunched over the same little square of paper, tittering. “I have a journal from every film that  I’ve done,” she says, as the video stutters back on. 

Behind her, a painting dissolves into the dark. I can make out a river, or think I can. She brings her face closer, turns it this way and that. “The eye is fine,” she says, squinting at it.  “It is just skin irritation, under the continued assault of makeup.” An ophthalmologist has  given it the all-clear, and she is home (Bengaluru) for a few days before returning to Kochi,  where she has hit upon a breakfast she is happy to repeat (puttu and kadala curry) while  shooting her first Malayalam film with actor Nivin Pauly. Malayalam is the one language  Rukmini Vasanth has been late to. Since her Kannada debut in Birbal Trilogy Case 1 (2019),  she has gone on to work in Telugu and Tamil too, in films including Sapta Sagaradaache Ello  (2023), Bagheera (2024), Appudo Ippudo Eppudo (2024), Madharaasi (2025), Kantara: A  Legend Chapter-1 (2025), and most recently, Toxic (2026). 

Play acting 

Now 29, Vasanth had already worked out what she liked about acting and what she absolutely did not at the age of ten. She was playing the daughter of a freedom fighter in a play written by her parents: her mother, a Bharatanatyam dancer, and her late father, an army officer. What she loved happened after the curtain went up; everything before that, especially the same lines run and run again, felt like some strange obsession, only grown-ups were capable of.  “I know my lines. Why can’t I just go up on stage and do whatever I need to do?” she remembers asking. It was much later, during her teens, while putting on another play, she found herself fascinated by the mess before the finished thing. And once the acting bug was lodged, she wanted to know how actresses she admired had got their start, and spent hours tracing careers backwards, looking for the first little foothold. There was also a considerable amount of Pride and Prejudice along the way. “There’s one in which Colin Firth plays Mr Darcy, highly recommend, by the way,” she adds, her voice grinning and already halfway to 2015, or wherever this crush lives. “I mean, he was theDarcy of my dreams.” 

It took her a year and a half to tell her mother. “I have to be an actor, I have to. Copious tears were included,” she adds. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London was part of giving the audacious dream somewhere to put its feet. “The person that I am, credentials are very important, and so is structure. I wasn’t going up the creek without a paddle.” Up until RADA, her free hours belonged to her mother’s dance rehearsals, with the chairs pushed against the walls and a mirror taking up one whole side of the room, and the movies she watched, lots and lots of them. “London was a whole new world for me. They really relish live performance and invest a lot of money into creating these productions, but [it is] also a world where theatrical productions get as much advertising as films do in India,” she says. 

Once back in India, she found the training’s blind spot (it was Western to the bone) and went for something rooted closer to home, in the ancient art treatise Natya Shastra. “But my training from RADA is always the first place that I sort of tap into what I’m trying to create,” she adds, and it is perhaps why she tries new ways to enter a character.

Wearing the role 

She sends me one of the notebook’s pages, dated April 20, 2022. Underlines everywhere, her handwriting sloping forwards, a little late to the thought. It describes a man in jail, losing his nerve, and a woman trying to talk him back from the edge of it. “Remember this?  Remember us?” The words sit there like a hand reaching through the bars. A little further down, Vasanth has changed her mind. “She’s not fully cheerful. She’s also exhausted by everything.” 

With another character, she is having to work backwards. The director keeps telling her the character is happy-go-lucky. “If you tell me, traumatised or angsty, I know that like the back of my hand. But, happy? I have to work to get a sense of that. So, I make a playlist to channel her. Books help too. I really like one form of media to be a springboard for my art.” 

When I ask if there are keepsakes that refuse to fit between the pages, she tells me she once “maaro-fied” (as in quietly nicked, claimed, smuggled away) a dupatta from Sapta Sagaradaache Ello. The chiffon dupattas were always flying about her, billowing and filmy,  and a little unruly. Other films did not lend themselves to souvenir-taking. We both laugh,  imagining a trip to the supermarket in full silk and gold Kantara costume or in Toxic’s slinky teal gown.

Art of playmaking 

If only it was this easy to make everyone laugh. At RADA, she once spent a term doing clowning and discovered that she just could not make her classmates laugh. Falling on her butt got her the first smile. She kept doing it, long after the joke died, straight into a bruised tailbone.

Years later, as she sat tongue-tied in front of legendary filmmaker Mani Ratnam, someone whose films she had spent years studying, Making Movies by Sidney Lumet on his shelf came to her rescue. “We had this incredible conversation. One, where someone who’s been working  for 40 years and building incredible filmmaking worlds and somebody who is at that point,  like five years in—are both talking about what it means to learn from people who’ve come before us, and how you are forever a student. It’s something that gives you a great deal of  perspective and also tells you that there’s no finish line with this thing.”

These days, for her first Malayalam film, Vasanth has a tutor helping her with the ebbs and flows in a sentence that cannot be learnt by memorising words. Her camera roll is an inventory of creative prompts: a molten pink sky, a fluffy dog she refers to as catnip, a pillar she wants to sketch later, a quote screenshotted that she wants to write about on her flight back. “Think of it as a domino,” she says. Learning is playing is inventing. She will fall on her butt as many times as it takes to get it all right.

Talking to Vasanth, I begin to see the loose-limbed joy, the pleasure of play at work. You take a person apart and put her back together differently. Give her an earworm of a song. A  dog-eared book. A particular way of holding it while sipping her cup of tea. Let’s scratch that and make it matcha. What does she do when she wakes up? Why does she flinch like that?  What if I try it this way instead? The answer keeps wriggling, which means there is always something more to try. Mary Oliver’s instructions for living, a favourite of both ours, come to mind: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” Forty minutes with Rukmini and I think: what a way to spend a life

Editor: Snigdha Ahuja (@snigdha.ahuja)
Interview: Akshaya Pillai (@akshaya_pillai)
Photographer: Aastha Manchanda (@manchandaa)
Stylist: Nishtha Parwani (@nishthaparwani)
Cover Design: Mandeep Singh Khokhar (@mandy_khokhar19)
Makeup Artist: Savleen Kaur Manchanda (@savleenmanchanda)
Hair Artist: Sourav Roy (@souravv_roy_)
Editorial Coordinator: Shalini Kanojia (@shalinikanojia)
Fashion Assistants: Maitri Desai (@maitriidesaii) and Ria Kothari (@ria.kothari)
Fashion Intern: Siddhi Goswami (@styledbysiddhig)

On Rukmini: Dress, Cult Gaia (Galeries Lafayette) (@cultgaia) (@galerieslafayetteindia): cuff, Joolry (@karishma.joolry); rings, Golden Gazelle (@goldengazellegems)