The director says he spotted Dhir auditioning for another film entirely and pulled her into his own project because of how she switched between accented and unaccented Hindi.
Vanshika Dhir wasn't even trying out for Kunal Kemmu's film when he decided she had to be in it.
Kemmu, who has written and directed his upcoming action-comedy besides starring in it, says he first noticed Dhir at Mukesh Chhabra's casting office while she was auditioning for something else entirely. He needed an actor who could speak Hindi with a specific accent, but do it convincingly, not the stilted version most auditioning actors were bringing in. Dhir, he says, caught his eye for exactly the opposite reason.
"Vanshika hadn't auditioned for my film but when Mukesh, who is doing the audition process, was playing some others, I think she had auditioned for another film and I was looking for an actor who naturally had a bit of an accent but could speak Hindi also," Kemmu said. "Some were putting an accent and couldn't speak Hindi without an accent but when I saw her, mujhe laga ye sirf Hindi karti hai, so I asked her about and asked Mukesh to audition her for my film."
There was a small twist though. When Kemmu actually met Dhir, she spoke clean, unaccented Hindi.
"I remember she spoke shudh Hindi and then spoke Hindi without an accent, mujhe laga ye gadbad ho gayi," he said, before adding that once he asked her to try the accent again, she nailed it. The character clicked in rehearsals soon after, and that settled it.
It's a small story but a telling one. Casting directors' offices in Mumbai run on exactly this kind of accident, a filmmaker sitting in on someone else's session and walking away with his own lead. For Dhir, a debutant stepping into a film that also has Preity G Zinta and Sparsh Shrivastava in key roles, it's about as good a break as one could script.
The film itself, produced by Kemmu with Chirag Nihalani under their Drongo Films banner, dropped its trailer this week, all high-stakes action stitched together with the kind of chaos and comic timing Kemmu's built a name around as a performer. Now the marketing push shifts to the people in it, and Dhir's casting story is the first character beat the studio's chosen to spotlight.
The film opens in theatres on September 18. Whether Dhir's accent work translates from rehearsal room to the big screen is the thing audiences will actually get to judge in ten days.
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