'We’re Fed up of Playing the Good Girl': How Jyotika and Sonakshi Sinha Stood for Each Other in 'System'

There is a moment in System where nothing is said at all. Two women look at each other, the camera lingers, and the silence itself begins to feel argumentative. In another film, the moment might have been cut shorter, sharpened for pace, punctured by exposition. Here, director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari lets the discomfort sit.

For Sonakshi Sinha and Jyotika, who lead the Prime Video thriller, those pauses became central not only to the film’s rhythm but to what it was trying to say about compromise, intimacy and survival.

“I feel people’s attention spans have become so low,” Sinha says, reflecting on the disappearing patience for stillness in contemporary storytelling. “Unless you’re really giving them something interesting and captivating and sensible to watch, they’re going to move on.”

She isn’t wrong. Cinema today is often engineered against silence: scenes clipped into velocity, performances compressed into reaction shots, emotion flattened into content. The irony, then, is that System — a film about gaming institutions and navigating moral murk — derives much of its power from simply... waiting.

“There are very few films which showcase the silence and give it its due respect and time on screen,” Jyothika says.

That stillness extends to the relationship between their characters, Neha and Sarika, whose dynamic evolves from wary coexistence into something emotionally tangled and difficult to define. Watching them together, one senses an intimacy that feels almost romantic in its intensity — not because the film explicitly frames it that way, but because female friendships are so rarely afforded this level of emotional scrutiny on-screen.

Sinha laughs off the suggestion that the chemistry was consciously played that way. “No, no, it’s wildly different,” she says. “That’s not a part of our characters; it’s not a part of the script at all.”

She admits, the connection deepened naturally through performance. “It’s a growing friendship. From being complete strangers to working together, to getting to know her family, her daughter calling me Maasi in the film."

Jyotika attributes some of that emotional charge to the ease they found with each other off-camera. “We did admire each other. And we did get along on set very well,” she says. “Most of our takes are also first, second or third. We really cried. So maybe all that comes across as a different form of chemistry to a watcher.”

The emotional texture of System also comes from its refusal to divide women neatly into heroes and villains. Both actors speak with visible relief about finally getting to inhabit morally grey characters after years of being boxed into more virtuous archetypes.

“It’s very interesting to play grey,” Jyotika says. “We’re fed up of playing the good girl.” “Our job is to resonate with a common man,” she continues. “And like I said, everyone’s grey. There’s no one who’s black or white.”

Sinha puts it more mischievously: “It’s good to be bad sometimes.”

For actors who came into the industry at a time when unlikeable women were often flattened into cautionary figures, the shift feels meaningful. Streaming, especially, has opened up space for female characters to be contradictory, abrasive, selfish, vulnerable — sometimes all at once.

But System isn’t merely interested in moral ambiguity as performance texture. The film’s deeper anxiety lies in its view of institutions themselves: systems of power that force ordinary people into ethical compromise. Asked whether they have ever felt pressured to “game the system” in their own careers, both actors instinctively resist the idea.

“A very proud and bold no,” Jyothika says. “I’m too straightforward a person to get into any sort of rat race or play these PR games.” Instead, she says, she has always relied on the belief that, “if I do my work well, it will be noticed.”

It’s an idealistic answer in a conversation otherwise steeped in disillusionment. But perhaps that tension between cynicism and hope is exactly what gives System its uneasy pulse. The film may understand how institutions fail people, but it still clings to the possibility that human relationships can soften the blow.

For Jyotika, the takeaway she hopes women carry from the film is simple: “How we both stood for each other and that bond is very special.”

Sinha frames it more combatively. “I feel like that fight should never die when you’re up against a wall,” she says. “If people take that sort of strength, go back home with that in their minds, I’d be happy.”

System will stream on Prime Video from May 22.