On Monday, the makers unveiled the trailer of Pushpa — The Rise, an action thriller that focuses on the struggle for power between the natives of the forest where red sandalwood is found and the wide network of smugglers. While Allu Arjun’s character Pushpa drives the narrative, Rashmika Mandanna plays his love interest.

“As a multi-lingual actress, I have been learning a new language with almost every other film. I know almost six languages by now,” says Mandanna, who dabbled in Kannada and Telugu films over the past five years before setting her sights on Bollywood.

For Sukumar’s directorial venture that also features Fahadh Faasil, Mandanna had to pick up a new dialect. “I learnt the Chittoor slang, which is a mix of Tamil and Telugu. Picking up the dialect was difficult, as you have to get the nuances of the language right.”

The actor roped in a private dialect coach ahead of the movie’s shoot in early 2021. “I used to train for almost three to four hours a day. It took me a long time to learn it, but in the end, it was worth it,” says the actor, who has two Hindi projects — Mission Majnu and Goodbye — in the pipeline.