Can you imagine a leading lady spending just under thirty minutes in the make-up chair before a shot? For two films, the Student of the Year franchise kept things filmy with its designer uniforms, slow-motion romance, glamorous dance numbers and a trophy worth crying over. Its streaming debut, on the other hand, has decided to switch the lights off.
Student of the Year: After Dark swaps the campus romance for a murder mystery, and its leading lady, Shanaya Kapoor, has gone dark with it. Her character, Aditi Malik, demanded no make-up, no hair styling, not even a dap of lip gloss.
In conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, Kapoor shares how she couldn’t be happier about it. She points to a shot in one of the episodes that stood out to her, and made her embrace this character even more.
"I found it really cool that there was a little bit of upper lip sweat you can see, and there's a little pimple of mine too," she tells The Hollywood Reporter India. "When would I have gotten that chance to just let go and actually be in the moment?"
The JioHotstar series, directed by Reema Maya and produced by Dharmatic Entertainment, streams from November 13. Kapoor plays twins: Aayesha Malik, St. Teresa's queen bee, who is found dead, as well as her sister Aditi, who enters the school's cut-throat Student of the Year contest to find out what really happened.
The No-Glam Rulebook
Maya had already revealed that Kapoor cut her hair and shot without make-up for the role. The rulebook, it turns out, went much further. Kapoor and the hair and make-up team sat down with Maya and agreed on the bare minimum: no conditioner, no lip balm, no skincare and no trimming her nails.
"Those were very superficial things, but I think they kind of helped me stay in character a little bit," Kapoor says. The upside was a shorter make-up call. Kapoor spent the time she got back in her van with music, getting into Aditi's head before stepping out for a shot. Aayesha, the 'polished' twin, was a different story. On those days, she admits, she was perfectly happy checking the mirror and the monitor.
Building Her Filmography
Two releases in, Kapoor has worked across a range of genres. There was the romance Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan (2025) opposite Vikrant Massey and Bejoy Nambiar's survival thriller Tu Yaa Main (2026) with Adarsh Gourav. Now there is a murder mystery, and next is Zombie Reddy 2, her Telugu debut.
Asked if there is a conscious strategy behind the roles she picks, or a worry about being typecast, Kapoor says it hasn’t been her call yet. "I don't think I've reached that stage yet, where I'm sitting and I have scripts and I'm choosing from them," she says. "My career has just started."
Her route in was hardly a straight line either. She auditioned for a different part, didn't get it, and that same audition led to her first film, Aankhon Ki Gustaakhiyan. Tu Yaa Main happened because she simply wanted to work with Nambiar. She puts the rest down to the universe meeting her halfway.
The Genre She Wants Next
Kapoor shares how she's been enjoying a new label regarding her filmography. "The audience is like, 'Is she the new horror queen? Or the new scream queen?' And I'm like, when did this happen? How did this happen? You can't plan this," she says.
With a survival thriller and murder mystery now ticked off, what she wants next is a full-blown horror film. It helps that she is a genuine fan. Kapoor describes herself as the kind of viewer who watches horror alone at 3 am, and who is first in line on release day. "There's no way you're going to stop me on a Friday night watching a horror movie," she muses.
Changing Perceptions
Growing up in front of cameras, Kapoor knows the question that follows her around: will she only ever do the hair-flying, saree-in-the-breeze roles? "It's a dream and I want to do all of that," she laughs.
Kapoor credits Nambiar and Maya for seeing something else in her. For a young actor, being told a director wants to strip away the glamour because they believe she can carry it is, in her words, "the biggest, biggest compliment I could have received".
Student of the Year: After Dark streams on Jio Hotstar from November 13.