Aneet Padda hadn't done a single promotional event since Saiyaara turned into last year's sleeper hit. That changed Wednesday in Mumbai, where she showed up for the trailer launch of Hunkkaar - The Roar and the cameras, by all accounts, did not calm down for a while.

She was joined on stage by Fatima Sana Shaikh, Raghubir Yadav, Zoya Hussain and Mohd Zeeshan Ayyub, the rest of the cast for the JioHotstar series. Aneet did a short performance before settling in to talk about the show, and about a character she says nearly made her doubt herself while shooting.

"I was quite young when I auditioned," she said. "The show tackles a very powerful and sensitive topic for somebody so young to fully understand. But that was perfect for the character because she was 17. Something terrible happened to her. She possibly couldn't even articulate it to herself, let alone the world. Yet, she had to do it." Aneet was 19 when she auditioned and 20 when the show shot, by her own account, and she said reading the script kept pulling her toward a strange kind of self-doubt. "The more I was reading the script, the more I kept on feeling like 'Am I lying?' This is because all the other perspectives are so strong that it's almost making me question myself."

That theme, of one person's account getting drowned out by everyone else's opinion of it, is what she called the heart of the show. "As soon as somebody shares a personal experience in public, it quickly becomes everybody's matter," she said, describing how a person telling their own story can end up second-guessing it once the commentary starts pouring in.

She also talked about a workshop exercise that apparently shaped how she approached the part. Her acting teacher, she said, asked her flatly, in Hindi, whether she considered herself a victim and how she was feeling, and told her to answer without thinking it through. Whatever came out, she said, carried fear and anger at once, certainty and uncertainty in the same breath. She wouldn't spell out what that answer was on stage, calling it a spoiler, but said it's in the show.

Hunkkaar - The Roar lands on JioHotstar on September 25, and this trailer event was really the first real test of how much of Saiyaara's audience follows Aneet into a much darker, heavier register. A teenage-abuse drama billed as a coming-of-age story is a long way from the romance that made her a name overnight.

Whether audiences show up the same way remains to be seen. The trailer is out, the release date is set, and for the first time since Saiyaara, Aneet Padda is back in front of the cameras answering for a role instead of a moment.