Shriya Pilgaonkar is having the kind of September most actors would kill for. Two theatrical releases, two entirely different registers. Mirzapur: The Movie has already hit screens with her back as Sweety Gupta, the character she has played across the franchise's run. Haiwaan, the Priyadarshan thriller with Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan, opens September 11.

What's got her talking isn't the double release so much as what happens inside it. In Haiwaan, Pilgaonkar shot her first full-scale, glamorous Bollywood dance number, a scene she describes as unlike anything she's done before, including the two songs she's already filmed for Mirzapur.

"What's exciting about Mirzapur and Haiwaan is that the looks and characters are completely different," she told Bollywood Hungama. "While I've filmed songs before and have 2 songs in Mirzapur too, this is my first full-scale, glamorous Bollywood number, so it was a really exciting experience and different from the ones I shot for Mirzapur. It's a perfect Bollywood dance sequence where we have Saif, Akshay, me and Saiyami in the song and we totally had a blast. The energy on set was palpable, it was choreographed by Bosco. As an actor I always wanted to be part of a song like this and I hope audience enjoy as much as I did filming it."

That's four leads sharing a frame, Pilgaonkar, Saif Ali Khan, Akshay Kumar and Saiyami Kher, on a Bosco number for a film that also has Boman Irani in a key role. It's a big, glossy set piece for an actor whose recent work has leaned procedural and grim, Guilty Minds, The Broken News, The Mandala Murders.

Two films, two very different Pilgaonkars

Sweety Gupta has been part of the Mirzapur universe since the show first streamed, and returning to her for the film version is less a stretch than a homecoming. Haiwaan asks for something else entirely, a song sequence, a different kind of camera, a different kind of energy. Pilgaonkar's point is that she gets to do both in the same month, without either performance bleeding into the other.

Haiwaan releases September 11. Whether the song becomes the film's calling card the way title tracks sometimes do, or whether Priyadarshan's thriller plot ends up carrying the weight, is the thing to watch once the film is actually out and the reviews start landing.

Pilgaonkar's slate doesn't stop there either. She has Baara Number coming up, a horror film directed by Vir Das, adding yet another genre to a year that already has her moving between a gangster saga and a big-budget thriller with a song in the middle of it.