Oct 05, 2026 10:02am IST
‘Hunkkaar’ Director Karan Kapadia On Aneet Padda’s Meteoric ‘Saiyaara’ Rise: ‘It Surprised the Entire World’ (EXCLUSIVE)
When Karan Kapadia first worked with Aneet Padda, she was still a relatively unfamiliar face. Years before “Saiyaara” turned her into an “overnight sensation,” the director had already seen what she could do as an actor. He first worked with her on a short film with Nitya Mehra and later, on “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” These experiences gave him an early glimpse of the qualities that would eventually make her a standout in “Hunkkaar: The Roar.”
In the series, Padda plays Meenu Rawat, a 17-year-old who accuses a hugely influential godman of sexual assault. While the story is populated by police officers, lawyers, journalists and the powerful figure at the centre of the case, Meenu herself has relatively few dialogues. That makes her extended courtroom monologue towards the end of the series all the more significant. For Kapadia, the scene was always meant to give the survivor something the rest of the series had deliberately held back: a voice of her own.
“Honestly, I had everything in the show that I wanted to talk about, but the perspective of the victim. We never really had the perspective of this person. When I set out to do it, the most important thing was that we needed to hear her voice,” he says. “Her voice is the final voice for deliberating this case because we've heard both perspectives on it completely.”
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Kapadia says the scene emerged after a workshop with Padda, where he saw her perform material that eventually became part of the sequence. He knew immediately that it needed to be part of the series. The director then dedicated an entire day to filming it. “I knew how critical, how important it was for us to achieve the emotion that we wanted to. And with all the cinematic craft that we'd used, I wanted to be right up in her face,” he says. “I wanted to stay with her. I wanted to feel her emotions.”
The director remains particularly proud of the result. “It was honestly the best work I'd ever done. I didn't know I'd be able to get there. Between that scene and the climax of the show, those scenes are something I'm deeply proud of.”
That response gave him confidence that the sequence would connect with viewers too. “In fact, I told Aneet before the show came out that this scene is going to blow up and it has. It's insane how people are resonating with it.”
Kapadia’s belief in Padda, however, predates “Saiyaara” by several years. He says her potential was apparent early on. “She stood out for us immediately when she did that short film with Nitya. I remember Nitya telling me about her and then we did ‘Big Girls’ with her. Very confident actor. Very enthusiastic and hungry.”
What particularly stayed with him was her ability to balance contrasting qualities. “I felt she had the chops to be able to play with emotional maturity. Get the childlike quality. Get the rebellious kind of anger or the burning desire within her.”
He believes that internal fire was crucial to Meenu. “She has this fire inside her that comes out in her work. And it comes out in her character and her being from this generation.”
“Hunkkaar” was completed before “Saiyaara” became a phenomenon. And even he was surprised by the scale of what followed. “It surprised the entire world including her and all of us, to be honest.” But Padda’s success did not alter how he viewed her or the performance she had already delivered in “Hunkkaar”. “For me, it didn't change anything in terms of the way I approached her or the person that she is. She's still the same person in that respect and once you remove all the noise and all the glitter and all of that, there's this human being behind that and that relationship never changed.”
For Kapadia, “Saiyaara” did bring one significant benefit to “Hunkkaar”: a larger audience discovering Padda could now discover the work she had done before becoming a star. “The added bonus was that she had done ‘Saiyaara’ and it exploded the way it did. For me, for any filmmaker, it's important to get your story out there to as many people that can watch it. How we get there is not really important. What's important is that people watch it and see it.”
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