The Curious Case of Tripti Dimri
A still from Dhadak 2 (2025)
Tripti Dimri has become the newest face of self-made stardom, paving her professional path with roles ranging from complex feminist heroines to objectified ‘items’ for the male gaze. With her career at a tipping point, can she avoid the industry’s pitfalls and rise to the apex?
There is much to admire about Shazia Iqbal’s Dhadak 2, which released in August this year. The film was an incisive, no-holds-barred commentary on the perverse pervasiveness of caste in contemporary urban India. It featured a raw and restrained acting performance by Siddhant Chaturvedi, and announced Tripti Dimri’s glorious return to form. Dimri plays Vidhi, a wealthy Brahmin law student who falls in love with an impoverished Dalit classmate named Neelesh (Chaturvedi). In a social milieu where ‘honor killings’ still make daily headlines, the couple’s coming together shakes up the status quo, bringing to light just how deeply rooted caste and class hegemony is even among the seemingly ‘good’ and educated. As a privileged hothouse flower, oblivious to the thorniness of the savarna structure, Dimri gives a blistering performance strongly reminiscent of her work pre-Animal (2023)—Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s blood-fest that achieved stratospheric success.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Dimri mentioned that Animal opened up doors for her, making it possible for her to experiment, try out new things. But whether it be the sultry 50 Shades of Grey-inspired song “Jaanam” in Bad Newz (2024) or Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video’s (2024) promotional dancing track “Mere Mehboob”, Dimri had fallen into the same old trap, catering to the male gaze in the way she had in Animal’s soulful ballad, “Pehle Bhi Main,” which reduced her to a mere titillating object whose sole purpose was to stoke male desire, a jarring contrast to all her subversive, feminist career choices thus far.
A bite-sized part in a wildly problematic film may have accorded Dimri nationwide recognition, but the actress has been garnering critical acclaim since her first leading role Laila Majnu (2018). In the sweeping, star-crossed Sajid Ali romance, she played the eponymous Laila opposite Avinash Tiwari. Roles in Anvita Dutt’s dark feminist fables Bulbbul (2020) and Qala (2022) cemented Dimri’s position as a thinking actor who was unafraid to take bold risks and had the makings of a star—the elusive mix which has been the foundational force behind the most successful actors of the current Hindi film landscape, whether it be Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, or Alia Bhatt.
Take Bulbbul for instance, where Dimri is cast in the titular role. Set in the Bengal presidency of the 1880s, the Netflix film brilliantly fuses the mythical with the supernatural to tell a timeless tale of how extremely violent an experience it is to be a woman in a man’s world. A rare Hindi movie that does glorious justice to the tricky genre of social horror, it uses its heroine’s precarious physical and social status to put on horrific display the ease with which a woman’s body, and her entire being can be violated and mutilated bit by bit. In this fever-dream of a fairy tale, Bulbbul’s feet become a recurrent motif. At the beginning they signal and support her naive desire for freedom. In the second act they transform into the object of punishment. Towards the end they become her scarlet letter—the unmistakable proof of her new, splintered self.
Next came Qala, another deliciously moody, atmospheric period drama that starred Dimri as the eponymous protagonist, a fragile female in a deeply parochial, patriarchal milieu where a woman could claim space only by sacrificing herself—body, sanity, et al. As the unloved, oft ignored, and outshined gharana singer, Dimri’s Qala Manjushree had to beg, seduce, and kill. only to ultimately find her way to the gallows.
But even though Bulbbul and Qala offered Dimri meaty, author-backed central roles that enabled her to showcase her kaleidoscopic acting prowess, they also boxed her in a suffocating niche. Doing a sudden 180-degree swerve with Vanga’s Animal must have felt liberating. In the film—the biggest blockbuster of 2023—she played Zoya, the femme fatale who falls in love with her prey. It was not her character’s minuscule screen-time or hyper-sexualization as much as her utter lack of agency that shocked a sizable section of viewers and ignited public fury for months, especially among audiences who were familiar with her earlier work. Dimri’s role in Animal was the antithesis of her previous career choices: If a raging fire lit Bulbbul from within, and Qala let subdued embers burn everything around her, Zoya in Animal was all things no woman should ever be—a piece of meat tossed around by men to do their bidding.
However, problematic politics and its domino effect notwithstanding, Dimri’s drastic daring has paid her rich dividends. From small-budget streaming projects Animal has placed her at the centre of massy entertainers alongside Bollywood bigwigs such as Vicky Kaushal, Rajkummar Rao, and Kartik Aaryan. But greater visibility in mainstream cinema comes with its typical trappings and gender binaries. In the one year between Animal and Dhadak 2, Dimri has had three releases—Bad Newz, Vicky Vidya Ka Woh Wala Video and Bhool Bhulaiyya 3— where she has got to do little but play pretty.
Bollywood is notorious for reducing people into tropes. To Dimri’s credit, she has broken free and made a home run with Dhadak 2. As an affluent upper-caste law student, her character Vidhi is blissfully ignorant of her privilege until she meets Neelesh and sees up close how hard he must struggle just for basic rights and dignity that she always took for granted. Oppression seeps into the bones of the oppressed. It informs their every action, waking thought, even dreams.
Dimri imbues Vidhi with a throbbing agency that powers through even the most rigid, persistent resistance and divides that she is presented with. Courtesy her singular filmography, by now Dimri can take a masterclass in how to portray both strength and fragility in the same moment. She plays out with remarkable skill the central conflict of a woman who knows enough to see beyond caste confines, but not enough to truly see the unvarnished, often ugly reality it comes straddled with.
Recent roles have cemented Dimri’s position as a thinking actor who was unafraid to take bold risks and had the makings of a star—the elusive mix which has been the foundational force behind the most successful actors of the current Hindi film landscape
An alumna of FTII (Film and Television Institute of India), Dimri has paved her professional path painstakingly through the last decade, getting the camera to focus on her a little more with each new film. In an industry where the nepotism debate has been raging like wildfire (and further stoked by Kangana Ranaut during an infamous interview on Koffee With Karan), Dimri—a rank outsider—has become the newest face of self-made stardom. Thus, she carries on her shoulders a mantle of responsibility: of matters which roles she takes up, how she is perceived, and what she makes of the opportunities offered to her.
Though it’s been an exciting run so far, Dimri’s career now hangs precariously on an unsteady balance. The decisions she makes now will have an indelible impact on her path ahead, and how she will rise distinctively above her contemporaries. Take Tamannaah Bhatia for instance, who enjoyed early accolades as a rising star in Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi cinema, before making a mainstream turn in the 2015 blockbuster Baahubali: The Beginning. In 2024, Bhatia received an overwhelming reception of her cameo in the dance track “Aaj Ki Raat” from Stree 2, but the success only put her in quicksand. In the one year since, she has featured in two more ‘item songs,’ the latest being “Ghafoor” from the 2025 Netflix show Ba***ds of Bollywood. Public memory is fragile, fleeting. If Bhatia doesn’t pivot soon, people will take no time to forget that she is an actor too—one with a sizable body of work—as they did with Katrina Kaif.
Kareena Kapoor Khan is another example, albeit in a different direction. In the noughties, she starred in a series of terrible films that tanked at the box office without a trace and were also panned critically. But instead of falling in the pit that she had invariably dug for herself, she sidestepped it by quickly switching tracks. In her 25 years in Bollywood so far, she has done it all–been a diva, done ‘item songs’, played to the gallery, starred in mega-sized masala films, and also acted in critically-acclaimed movies made by some of the most revered auteurs of the country. The secret to her career longevity and enduring relevance is her stubborn refusal to get pigeonholed. There are few heroines in Hindi cinema who have been the face of characters as wildly popular as Poo and Geet and have done films as diverse as Omkara, 3 Idiots, Chameli, Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Jaane Jaan.
Dimri, however, doesn’t have the privilege of the dynastic support like Kareena. Of course, she isn’t just an outsider who has made it in the Hindi film industry. Many female actors before her who came from unrelated backgrounds and broke out nonetheless, including superstars like Deepika Padukone and Kriti Sanon. And yet, the 31-year-old Dimri’s journey stands out because it is playing out at a watershed moment in Hindi cinema when everything is in flux. Bollywood no longer wields the power it used to, the nature of stardom is fast changing, how we create and consume entertainment has transformed entirely.
This present state of turmoil is sure to make way for a new world order. If she plays strategically, Dimri may well be poised for the apex.
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Sneha Bengani is a film and culture critic. She has written extensively on cinema, gender, books, and pop culture for some of India’s leading news publications, such as CNBC-TV18, Firstpost, CNN-News18, and Hindustan Times. Over the years, she has lived in various cities across the country but her home and heart are in Jaipur. You can find her on Instagram: @benganiwrites and Twitter: @benganiwrites.
