In 2014, former Miss India Manasvi Mamgai forayed into Hindi films with Ajay Devgn’s Action Jackson. Playing the antagonist, she hoped, would pave the way for complex roles. Instead, she says that playing a villain backfired in an industry that is quick to typecast actors. Almost a decade since, the actor is returning to the screens with The Trial.

In the Kajol-led legal drama, Mamgai plays a role loosely based on a star girlfriend who is at the receiving end of suspicion and hate after the unexpected demise of her partner. The obvious reference point is Rhea Chakraborty in light of what unspooled in the Sushant Singh Rajput case after his death in 2020.

“I want people to reflect on what’s happening in society. That’s why I took this role. I’ve gone through something like this, in a different intensity. In my first film, I portrayed a role that was hard to stomach. After watching Action Jackson, my friends and family said, ‘What did you do?’ That was a morally dubious character. I got identified as that, and the roles that came my way after that were all similar. So, I wanted to do this role to challenge how we go on a witch-hunt, without understanding the other person’s perspective. Here, a lot of emotions came from my own anger,” she says.

While her last movie was with Devgn, it’s serendipitous that she is making a comeback with his actor-wife Kajol. She is all praise for her co-star. “On my first day of shoot, she was singing my song, Gangster Baby. I [assumed] she would be an unapproachable big star, but she is down-to-earth. Even as an actor, she helped me so much.”

Over the past nine years, Mamgai was in the USA, building a life away from Bollywood. The “gypsy at heart” believes that life can’t be just about acting and modelling. “I moved to Los Angeles because I didn’t want to be bound by an industry. I did a rescue dive course and studied production.”

She is now working on her first Hollywood production, which will be based on the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III. “We’ve acquired the life rights of the kidnapper. This will be the mafia’s perspective on it.”