At the teaser launch for her pan-India film Mysaa, the actor recalled an eight-hour underwater shoot and a 90-foot leap that left her hurt with 12 days of filming still left.
Rashmika Mandanna says she tore a ligament in her hip while dancing on the sets of Mysaa, an injury her doctor apparently told her is more common among footballers than actors. She brought it up at the film's teaser launch in Chennai, and she wasn't entirely joking when she said the shoot in Kerala's forests nearly did her in.
Mysaa, directed by Ravindra Pulle, is being positioned as a big pan-India release, dropping in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada and Malayalam on November 27. The cast around Rashmika includes Samuthirakani, Eswari Rao, Tarak Ponnappa, Guru Somasundaram and Rahul Ravindran. The teaser is already out and has cranked up expectations for a film that, going by her account on stage, put her through a genuinely rough shoot.
The 90-foot jump
The centrepiece of her retelling was Athirappilly falls, where the director apparently wanted her to leap from 90 feet up. Rashmika said she's scared of heights to begin with, so the day was spent shaking before the jump even happened. Once she was in, the team kept her in the water for roughly eight hours straight. Her line for it, more or less: she isn't a fish, and eight hours submerged is not a normal ask for anyone.
She also flagged a fight sequence shot in mud as one of the harder days on set, saying it took everything she had to get through those takes.
Before any of that, on a hilltop, she says the director asked her to sprint at full speed, and when she raised the obvious concern, that a fall could mess up schedules for her other films, he wasn't having it.
The injury and what's left
The ligament tear happened during a dance sequence, by her account, with 12 days of shoot still pending at the time. She said the memory of it still unsettles her a little, and that doctors put the recovery at around three weeks. Her framing of the whole episode leaned more amused than bitter, something like: if a director is passionate about a scene, she'll do whatever it takes, but this crew took that a fair distance.
None of this reads as a formal complaint. It's Rashmika doing what actors do at these events, turning a punishing shoot into a story with a punchline. But the physical toll she's describing, a torn ligament, an eight-hour water sequence, a jump off a genuine waterfall, is more than the usual promotional colour.
With Mysaa five films deep into a marketing push and a November 27 date locked in, the teaser will have to carry that story for now. Whether the finished film matches the scale of what she went through to make it is the question November answers.
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