The writer-producer tells Bollywood Hungama that audience response to Gandhari has pushed her toward riskier, less conventional storytelling in whatever she writes next.
Kanika Dhillon isn't shy about admitting she likes to mess with formula. In a new interview with Bollywood Hungama, the writer-producer says the response to Gandhari has only made her more convinced that refusing to play by genre rules is the right call.
"Usually, all my stories never conform to a certain template," Dhillon says. "Either they are a genre bender, or they are always pushing the boundaries of black and white and grey zones and across the spectrum."
That's not a new position for her. Dhillon has built a career out of scripts that resist easy labelling, and she says the instinct isn't about novelty for its own sake. It's about finding something unfamiliar inside a genre audiences think they already know. "So that is why I need to push the genre, twist the genre, bend the genre, merge two genres, unpredictable characters," she explains, describing a process that also involves taking familiar clichés and using them in ways nobody expects.
She's aware this approach can split a room. Some viewers love the unpredictability, some just want the movie to behave. Dhillon says that risk doesn't put her off.
"As a maker, it really excites me to sort of break the mould and try and push myself to see what new and what different can I do in a certain genre," she says.
What's changed, according to Dhillon, is the scale of validation. Gandhari's numbers and its reach, she says, have given her more confidence to lean further into unconventional territory rather than pull back.
"Yes, definitely the resounding success of Gandhari and the audience mandate has encouraged me and humbled me to, you know, take more chances and more risks and continue to tell very unconventional, very rooted stories that speak to an audience," she tells Bollywood Hungama.
It's a fairly specific thing to say out loud. Writers often talk about wanting creative freedom in the abstract. Dhillon is tying that freedom directly to box office and audience reach, treating Gandhari's performance as proof of concept rather than a one-off.
The throughline in her comments is that she doesn't see rootedness and unpredictability as opposites. She wants stories that feel local, specific, emotionally recognisable, but delivered in a shape audiences don't see coming. Whether that means another genre mashup or a script that plays with morality in shades of grey, Dhillon isn't naming a project yet.
What she is naming is intent. More risk, not less. The question now is what that looks like on paper, and how soon Bollywood finds out.
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