Anjali Sivaraman on Her Character Ramya in 'Bad Girl': 'Her Life Always Felt Like A Daydream'

When Anjali Sivaraman first heard the narration for Bad Girl, she didn’t feel like she was stepping into someone else’s skin. Instead, she saw pieces of herself in Ramya, the film’s protagonist. “Initially, when the story was narrated to me, what I felt and what I saw was myself in that character,” Anjali recalls. “And so that’s where I started.”

The journey from there was collaborative. Much of it was shaped by her conversations with director Varsha Bharath, who encouraged her to immerse herself not just in the script but also the essence of the character.

“Through our conversations and the research that we did, with all of the movies that Varsha made me watch, all of the music that she made me listen to, Ramya took shape,” she says. Among them was a specially curated “Bad Girl playlist” that became central to her process. “Basically, yeah, just like her life has always felt like a bit of a daydream and I think this music set the score to that daydream. So it helped me get into the mind of Ramya a little better.”

Cinema also played its part. One of the films that guided Anjali was Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, which she watched for the first time while preparing for Bad Girl. “Such a beautiful movie,” she says, reflecting on how stories about “dysfunctional teenage girls who are coming of age and discovering themselves” informed her approach to Ramya.

But perhaps the most defining aspect of Anjali’s performance was the freedom of collaboration on set. “There was still an open dialogue between the two of us and it wasn’t like constricted to, oh you have to do it like this or you have to do it like that,” she explains. “We were able to flow with it and just go with where it was taking us, the story, and feed off everyone’s energy.”