If you’ve scrolled through X in the past few days, you’d have come across the ‘blue saree wali’ that social media is crushing on. Meet actor Girija Oak Godbole, who is being touted ‘India’s answer’ to American actor Sydney Sweeney and Italian model Monica Bellucci by excited fans on social media. She has been working in Marathi and Hindi cinema for two decades.

Speaking about going viral for the first time, she tells us, “I am amused! My phone started buzzing like crazy on Sunday evening. I was in rehearsals for my play and couldn’t take calls. Suddenly, all my friends were messaging me, ‘Do you know what’s happening on X?’”

The actor adds, “One sent me a post debating if it was (actor) Priya Bapat or me! Then my devar told me some cheap handles picked up my pictures and there was a whole ‘bhabhi lover’ scene happening. Some pages sexualized me. But Marathi fans said, ‘You’ve only just discovered her! We’ve known her for years’.”

As memes flooded X, Girija took it in stride: “At the cost of sounding wise and old, it’s a trend; it’ll come and go. The work I do is here to stay. If people discover my work now, that makes me happy.”

Despite some of the more explicit content, her family, she says, wasn’t fazed: “Fortunately, I come from a film family. My father’s an actor, my father-in-law is a producer, my husband’s a filmmaker. We understand you can’t control perceptions. I never have to go out of my way to explain, because we’re all aware of the nature of the beast. If you put yourself on a pedestal, people will talk.”