Ross Butler and Marc Evan Jackson are joining Sayani Gupta on Arya, her first American feature, according to Bollywood Hungama. Butler, known for Riverdale and 13 Reasons Why, and Jackson, a familiar face from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, come in for key roles alongside Gupta, who plays the title character.

Arya is written and directed by Neil Tuli, marking his feature directorial debut too. The story follows a disciplined piano teacher from a well-regarded Indian conservatory who takes a posting in northern Minnesota to rescue a struggling school band program, partly to feed her own career ambitions back home. Her arrival, naturally, does not go smoothly. She ends up confronting her own insecurities along the way, per the outlet's description of the project.

The supporting cast already includes Arjun Gupta, Adi Roy, Kyra Leroux and Iqbal Theba. Gupta is not just leading the film. She is also an executive producer on it, alongside Butler himself, which puts her on both sides of the camera on an American indie for the first time.

That's notable because Gupta has spent a good decade building her name on Indian OTT with layered, culturally rooted characters. Carrying an entire US indie feature as its lead is a different kind of assignment, and producing it adds another layer to what's already a packed year for her.

Because this isn't happening in isolation. Weeks before the Arya casting news broke, Gupta's own directorial debut, a short film called Aasmani, picked up selections at ten film festivals across two months, spanning continents. Aasmani is a small, personal story, centred on a 60-year-old grandmother and her 10-year-old granddaughter and their powder blue Fiat. Gupta wrote and produced it herself. It has been playing festivals from Washington DC to Tokyo to Kerala, and by all accounts, the response has been warm.

Put the two together and you get an actor moving in three directions at once this year: acting lead on a US feature, producer on that same feature, and now a director whose debut short is quietly making the festival rounds on its own steam. It's not the kind of year most actors a decade into their career get to have, jumping between Indian OTT and American indie cinema without slowing down for either.

No release date or festival premiere has been announced for Arya yet. Given how quickly Aasmani has been travelling, expect news on that front before the year is out.