She has been in the film business for over eight years now, but Malavika Mohanan is yet to wrap her head around the need for actors today to look their best round the clock.

“The one thing I still don’t get is looking glamorous all the time. I can’t,” the actor admits, adding, “And this paparazzi culture, arre yaar, yeh kya hai? I’m somebody who loves to dress up, but when I step out to go to a salon or restaurant, I’m always in loose clothes with my hair tied in a bun. I don’t like putting on makeup every single day. I like to let my skin breathe.”

And what this leads to is something Mohanan, again, doesn’t understand: “When you get papped in these kind of clothes, you look ridiculous. And then, you realise you’re going to be clicked, so you have to put on some makeup, which is another process. You have to look good all the time.”

She agrees that being an actor is a ‘full time job’, and confesses it is something she would never get used to. “I will probably figure out a way to do it, but I’m not very kicked about it,” says the 27-year-old, whose Hindi film career began with acclaimed filmmaker Majid Majidi’s Beyond The Clouds (2017).

Since her debut, the actor hasn’t taken up any Hindi film, but has managed to carve a niche for herself in the Tamil film industry with films such as Petta (2019) and Master. She’ll be seen next in Yudhra, alongside Siddhant Chaturvedi. Ask if anything has changed in the process of choosing films from the time she entered the business to now, and she says, “The kind and amount of films being offered to me are bigger, I have a bigger roster to pick up from, and across different industries. I have got more offers in Hindi in the last six months. It’s a matter of picking which projects I want to be a part of.”