Regina Cassandra has had a great start to the year, with her film Vidaamuyarchi, opposite south superstar Ajith Kumar, hitting theatres this week. We sit down with the actor to discuss her character—an adventurous, thrill-seeking woman who keeps everyone on their toes. Cassandra says filming with Ajith was her biggest motivation for taking on the project.

“This is the first Tamil superstar I’m working with. The journey has been enriching. I trusted director Magizh Thirumeni to write me a character I could do justice to. He was confident I’d be able to pull off the layered role. He cleared all the doubts I had about the script. Usually, in big-budget superstar films, they don’t give you much importance, scenes get cut, and things could go wrong, but my director made me feel that no one else could have played the role but me,” explains Cassandra.

She claims Ajith set a precedent on set with his behaviour. Besides working hard, he treated everyone around him with respect. “He is an inclusive person. Usually, in mainstream, massy movies, they shabbily write female parts. You realize the quality of the writing by seeing how well they write the characters, irrespective of the language. That’s why I trust my directors. However, some directors have let me down. Then I feel detached from whatever I signed up for.”

When asked why she hasn’t been seen much in Hindi cinema, she laughs, saying people feel that way about her in every industry. “I have three films lined up. Two are complete and ready for release, and the third is almost finished,” says Cassandra. Her next film is Jaat, directed by Gopichand Malineni and starring Sunny Deol and Randeep Hooda.