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The 10 Best Performances of Alia Bhatt, Ranked
As Alia Bhatt returns to the big screen a year after the release of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani with Jigra, The Hollywood Reporter India ranks the actor’s 10 best performances.
Alia Bhatt is many things: a born actor, a sworn star, a gifted nepotism baby, a solo hero, a shape-shifting heroine, a multistarrer specialist, a spiritual descendant of Kareena Kapoor Khan, a millennial icon and a modern producer. But, most of all, Alia Bhatt is inevitable. When she’s on-screen — performing and responding and feeling and dancing — it’s hard to imagine a moment when she isn’t. It feels like her personal space, natural habitat and artistic medium all at once. It’s a rare mix of relatability and distance, normal and aspirational: she is like everybody, but nobody is like her.
Her 19 feature-film roles so far have ranged from ordinary pieces (Student of the Year, Kalank, RRR, Brahmastra: Part One — Shiva, Sadak 2) to extraordinary parts (Udta Punjab, Gully Boy, Darlings); from striking halves (Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, 2 States, Kapoor & Sons, Shaandaar) to exhilarating fulls (Highway, Raazi, Dear Zindagi, Gangubai Kathiawadi). There are conformists and rebels, patterns and pattern breakers, daughters and lovers. However, if there’s one trait that all these women share, it’s courage.
It’s the courage to grow up and the guts to grow. It’s the courage to break and the audacity to shake. It’s the courage to be and the guts to become. It’s only fitting, then, that her 20th film is called ‘Courage’ itself. Vasan Bala’s Jigra stars Bhatt as a woman who sets out to rescue her younger brother from a foreign prison.
It marks the perfect excuse to write about some of Bhatt’s bravest performances. The rankings are almost incidental. Imagine trying to compose an all-time favourite movie list — the order changes every month. Except it’s not the quality of the titles that change; it’s our relationship with them.
10. 2 States (2014)
Alia Bhatt is a charming hybrid of dutiful daughter and bold girlfriend in Abhishek Varman’s cross-cultural romantic comedy. This film adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s book isn’t as effective as its spiritual sibling, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), but it worked wonders as a showcase for a versatile actor realising her potential in a breakout year. As Ananya Swaminathan, Bhatt nails the social awakening of an MBA student from a conservative Tamil Brahmin family who discovers freedom at IIM Ahmedabad. She speaks, teases, grins, makes her boyfriend (Arjun Kapoor) squirm and fumble, and generally demands attention in a way that implies that she is enjoying her newfound romantic and sexual agency. When juxtaposed with her poised but diminutive behaviour back home in Chennai with her parents, Bhatt’s performance transcends the average romcom template. She radiates heroine energy without overcooking both the traditionalism and the open-mindedness of her character. It’s also the first of multiple turns where Bhatt plays the relatively grounded partner in a relationship that fights for generational approval.
9. Badrinath Ki Dulhania (2017)
Wikipedia calls Vaidehi Trivedi a “beautiful and well-educated woman who has her own career aspirations,” but the description barely scratches the surface of what Bhatt brings to this seemingly familiar role. Not for the first time, a Hindi film story revolves around a patriarchal man-child hero (Varun Dhawan) who learns to improve after falling for an ambitious woman. Bhatt’s commitment-phobic Vaidehi, however, walks the talk by simply being herself; her reluctance morphs into acceptance on her own terms. She’s the rare Bollywood actress who is, more often than not, afforded a specific vocation on screen. Her identity is seldom limited to that of a lover alone; she’s always someone whose professional passion and personality shape her sense of partnership. Here, she’s an aspiring flight attendant; the diversity otherwise ranges from corporate executive (2 States) and cinematographer (Dear Zindagi) to spy (Raazi) and news anchor (Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani). Vaidehi is also the kind of parallel female hero that Parineeti Chopra played early in her career. Bhatt doesn’t hammer home the gender-equality message either — it’s an organic extension of the fact that some fictional characters, as in this case, play a version of Alia Bhatt.
8. Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023)
Of course, Rani Chatterjee has a signature music theme. And, of course, Alia Bhatt wears the most gorgeous sarees as this firebrand Bengali journalist who — along with an ultra-Punjabi Ranveer Singh (not in a saree) — upgrades the 2 States formula into a self-reflexive and pulpy indictment of Bollywood family values. Would it even be a Karan Johar movie otherwise? Bhatt has a blast as Chatterjee, a character operating as a cultural parody and caricature at once. After Gully Boy, she makes the most of her electric chemistry with Singh; the honeymoon phase of the couple, in particular, is a masterclass in “lust-wala love”. Watching Rani confused by her own feelings — she is both amused and aroused by a man she’s intellectually superior to but physically attracted to — remains one of the film’s biggest draws. It’s like she is betraying her own wokeness by desiring the Delhi-iest of Delhi gym-bros, yet she owns the unlikely romance as the cheeky descendant of the heroines she grew up imagining. It’s mainstream star wattage at its brightest: an entertaining and excessive ode to the contradictions of modern womanhood.
7. Dear Zindagi (2016)
Bhatt’s portrayal of Kaira — an aspiring image-maker who seeks therapy to resolve her own black-and-white flashbacks — validates a new generation that has strived to normalise mental health discourse and complex parental trauma. It’s an emotionally intelligent performance that conveys how the stigma associated with psychological duress is not different from the stigma surrounding the courage to dream. Kaira wants to be a storyteller, but her journey is rooted in her struggle to confront her own unedited story. Her attachment to an older therapist (Shah Rukh Khan) seems to stem from the very space that catalysed Veera Tripathi’s attachment to her kidnapper in Highway; it’s a natural space that blurs the line between feeling seen and being rescued. Bhatt has done similar coming-of-age journeys — as troubled daughters awakened by adulthood — while still distinguishing one from the other. It’s a testament to her identity in a storytelling culture replete with confused hero and man-child stereotypes.
6. Raazi (2018)
Alia Bhatt’s performance in Raazi works for the same reason her performances in Gangubai Kathiawadi and Udta Punjab shine: you don’t expect it to. She looks miscast in the role of a frantic Indian spy who marries into a Pakistani family — only to weaponise our preconceived notions of her inexperience, frightful youth, delicate frame and urban gait. Every perceived flaw supplies the point of her character. As Sehmat, she plays someone that nobody — both within the film and outside of it — is conditioned to suspect. Few non-YRF (Yash Raj Films) thrillers have challenged the idea of modern patriotism and war; even fewer have refused to demonise the ‘enemy’ and their ways. Raazi does both, thanks to Bhatt’s sharp and tender calibration of its themes. There’s a lived-in urgency about how Sehmat is perpetually torn between the patriot she is trained to be and the human she is threatening to become.
5. Darlings (2022)
Vijay Varma nails the scenery-chewing role of an abusive, alcoholic husband; it’s a chilling portrait of an everyday monster. Ironically, his manipulative main-character energy tempts us to overlook — and invisibilise — the women in Darlings. But Bhatt’s performance as his long-suffering wife, Badru, is deceptively alive to the world. Badru’s love is shaped by the alpha masculinity of the movies she’s grown up watching. She looks at him as a damaged and misunderstood hero in need of fixing. Bhatt seamlessly makes it look like Badru has gaslit herself as both a coping mechanism and social identifier; her denial is designed to defy her own generational trauma. Her transformation from diminutive victim to vengeful survivor is not filmy — it stems from a sense of numbness and scattered rage. It’s not Bhatt’s most showy turn, but it’s one that sells a risky ‘black comedy’ about domestic violence without any tonal gimmicks.
4. Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022)
It’s funny to think that Alia Bhatt had to “prove herself” as a Bhansali hero, only to redefine the sensory parameters of a Bollywood superstar instead. The trailer made the average Hindi film fan sceptical about the casting of Bhatt as a brothel madam, mafia don and social activist rolled into one. But was there ever any doubt — especially after Udta Punjab (2016) — about her capacity to not just surprise but surpass? She’s made a career out of excelling at unorthodox roles by trading cultural accuracy for emotional credibility. The dialects, accents, and gait stop mattering because of the sheer unpredictability she brings to a scene. As Gangubai, too, Bhatt stages the character’s performative charm and oratory swag as a front of sorts; the actor putting on an aura for the camera feeds into the character putting on that aura for society. Every time she drops the act (case in point: the song ‘Jab Saiyaan’), a lost girlhood emerges through the cracks of her flamboyant womanhood.
3. Highway (2014)
A sheltered, rich Delhi girl gets abducted; it becomes the cathartic trip she needed. Bhatt’s unvarnished refitting of Stockholm syndrome in Imtiaz Ali’s quasi-travel drama marries the artiste's city-bred greenness with the character's simmering innocence. Her breakout performance as Veera Tripathi comes like a bolt from the blue. The vulnerability is so explicit that it feels like Veera often imagines the goodness of her kidnappers to escape the social demons of her upbringing. She is almost determined to humanise these gruff strangers after being dehumanised by her own family. Her attitude — akin to a child tasting freedom for the first time — bleeds into a film that commits to its love story as a delusion rather than a statement. It’s a legacy-making turn that — with its final confrontation sequence — introduces Bhatt’s trademark as an ‘outburst specialist’ and a hall-of-fame crier.
2. Gully Boy (2019)
In terms of the Alia Bhatt Cinematic Universe, one can imagine a mercurial Safeena from Gully Boy schooling a meek Badru from Darlings and inspiring her to destroy her husband. Bhatt’s Safeena is so unapologetically toxic and territorial that the character unfolds as a tit-for-tat antidote to mainstream Bollywood’s masculinity problem; it also makes her few moments of affection for her boyfriend Murad all the more soothing. Bhatt plays Safeena as a young Muslim woman with so much conviction in herself that she wears different faces for different people. She pretends to be hapless with her parents (a classic moment: Safeena snaps back to normal seconds after softening her dad with a weepy tantrum), but she’s intuitive and streetsmart with Murad, and shrewd with their friends. Her end goal remains poignant — a no-holds-barred future with her childhood sweetheart. Her aggression is simply a defence mechanism; manipulating a patriarchal world to get her way is muscle memory.
1. Udta Punjab (2016)
It’s unfair to reduce Alia Bhatt’s visceral, wounded performance in Udta Punjab to “nobody saw it coming”. It’s a complicated role: she plays a weathered Bihari migrant whose spirit is snuffed out by Punjab’s drug epidemic in a Hindi film. But Bhatt is objectively great — a withering force of nature — in a way that concentrates the movie into a sum of her character’s wreckage. There’s cacophony and chaos around her, but her silence and suffering feel louder. Her depiction of Bauria transcends conventional norms — like texture, language, diction and tone — to capture the truth of the human condition. This freestyle acting evokes Ridley Scott’s eloquent takedown of cultural accuracy: “Like shut the f*ck up, then you’ll enjoy the movie”. When Bauria explodes and implodes, it’s not the sound of her voice that matters; she is resisting her fate as collateral damage in a setting rigged to erase her identity. It also reveals Bhatt’s unpretentious bridging of stardom and ambition. What might have been an experimental risk for her contemporaries feels like a natural progression — inevitable — in her case.