Alia Bhatt Is Going Global

The time is 8 a.m. and Alia Bhatt is on her way to the set of her next film, a spy action thriller called Alpha. She doesn’t like to waste time, so she takes Zoom meetings in the car as Mumbai commutes adhere to no schedule. I am on the other side of the screen, amid the late-night shadows of my New York City apartment. As Bhatt’s car weaves through traffic, I introduce myself by sharing a personal coincidence related to one of her last films, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, in which she plays a TV journalist—and brought the joy of rom-coms back to Indian audiences. Her character had graduated from Delhi University and Columbia University and so did I. If only I was as pretty as her, I remember thinking half-seriously after watching the film, I would feel fully represented. (I don’t tell her that part.)

Bhatt, a British citizen born and raised in Mumbai, is among the most celebrated actors in India and currently one of the most popular Indian celebrities in the world. In India she’s broken several glass ceilings for women in a male-dominated industry by producing films and drawing audiences to the theater with her star power alone. According to a recent report, she was the only woman among the top five Indian celebrities with the highest brand value, a list that includes superstar Shah Rukh Khan and cricketer Virat Kohli. “I feel a lot of good decisions and good people who have been a part of my journey have led me to this place in life,” Bhatt says. “I don’t think I ever overestimate or underestimate [my value].”

Given the realities of the click economy—Bhatt has 85 million Instagram followers— and the massive South Asian market, it should come as no surprise that international brands have taken notice of the star. In 2023 Bhatt became the first Indian global ambassador for Gucci. This year beauty giant L’Oréal Paris came courting. Bhatt calls it perfect timing. “I’ve just entered my 30s,” she says. “I feel like in your 20s you’re just figuring yourself out. Everything is chaotic, everybody is noisy, and you have a different feeling every day. You want to be associated with everything and anything. In your 30s, you just develop your own sort of cocoon and you’re like, ‘Sorry, thus far and no further,’ and ‘This is me and this is why.’ ”

Of course, in this instance, self-knowledge also comes with a huge payday. Yet it is a hallmark of brand relations never to talk about something as vulgar as money—or to do so only obliquely. “The association is not just about the products, it’s about the lineage that they have created over decades and the understanding of your worth,” Bhatt says, in what one could assume is an echo of L’Oréal Paris's famous slogan, “Because you’re worth it.” She is looking forward to being part of an illustrious cohort of women who have been associated with the brand. “I told them,” she recalls, ‘You all are known for your long-lasting relationships, and I’m monogamous.’ "

Bhatt may have wide-ranging appeal that makes her a natural choice to represent a beauty brand, but she doesn’t shy away from controversial topics in her film work. Gangubai Kathiawadi, in which she plays a sex worker advocating for labor rights in the 1960s, was a rare hit in 2022, when Indian cinema remained stuck in a pandemic lull. Usually only male hero-led films get the reach and release that her film received, but as the heroine, Bhatt surpassed box office expectations and won the prestigious National Film Award for her performance. She turned producer with the film Darlings, which was released on Netflix that same year and spotlighted domestic abuse in a marriage. Bhatt has given several unconventional and strong female characters to Indian cinema. “I've been raised to be defiant, independent, and to think for myself,” Bhatt says. “I guess I naturally gravitate towards these characters… They each have an inherent strength in them.” This is not to say she entirely shuns more mainstream fare. Bhatt appeared in the film RRR, an intense action epic that became a breakaway hit in the US months after its release, and won an Oscar for the song “Naatu Naatu.”

Bhatt has also become something of a global ambassador for the sari. Fans were obsessed with the chiffon saris she wore in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani. “Karan [Johar, the film's director] said, ‘I want you to only wear saris in the film and we need to make a sari cool. Young girls should be like, 'Oh, I only want to wear a sari.’ ” And that did happen, for young girls and older women too, prompting Bhatt and designer Manish Malhotra to put the collection for sale online. It sold out in minutes, while replicas flooded the markets. At Bhatt's wedding to actor Ranbir Kapoor, in 2022, she broke from the tradition of wearing red and wore an ivory organza sari by the celebrated Indian designer Sabyasachi. She also collaborated with him earlier this year for the Met Gala, wearing a mint green floral sari with a 23-foot-long train hand-embroidered with silk floss, glass beading, and gemstones. For this summer’s Mumbai wedding of billionaire heir Anant Ambani—a conspicuous-consumption spectacle Bhatt called “fabulous”—she wore a Manish Malhotra archival silk sari that was 160 years old. “It’s such a timeless garment, and I really feel my most comfortable in it,” she says. “It has been made especially for our climate because you’re free and comfortable and it looks so elegant, chic, and glamorous—everything at the same time.”

In 2022, Bhatt became a mother to a baby girl, Raha. “She’s naughty. She’s chatty. She has moments of being shy. She’s just her own person, but she’s very bright,” says Bhatt, becoming her most animated during our week of conversations this summer. Her biggest challenge, she says, is managing her time between work and motherhood: “That’s my main focus. How do I ping-pong between the two and do them well, but also find a way to carve out time for myself, which I'm not able to do. I'll be very candid right now—there’s no such thing as me time. I've not even been able to get a therapy session for the last two months.”

Motherhood, for Bhatt, has been a combination of extreme joy and extreme worry. “Your soul is sort of fulfilled, but you are also always full of fear and nerves because of just wanting to do it right and wanting to do it well,” she explains. In a society like India, where helicopter parenting is often the norm, Bhatt abides by something her parents told her: “Children come through you. They’re yours, you are a catalyst, you are a source for their life, but their life is not yours. Their life is theirs, and you just need to give them the tools to deal with their life.”

Motherhood may even be informing some of Bhatt’s acting choices. She is gearing up for her next release, Jigra, a thriller that follows a pair of siblings. Bhatt describes the film, which she coproduced, as “a classic sort of story [about] what extent you would go to for your loved one. At the time that I signed, I’d just given birth to Raha. So I think I was in my tigress mode, where I was like, I need to protect my cub.”

The tigress is perhaps the most fearsomely beautiful creature on the subcontinent, so it isn't a leap to wonder: How does Bhatt define beauty? She says she has a boring answer, though I disagree: “Beauty is truly what you perceive of yourself. When they say beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, that’s one way to look at it. But I genuinely feel beauty really lies within the eyes of yourself…. The way you perceive yourself is the way you project.”

There is no question that Indian beauty has captured the global imagination. One obvious reason to me is the unique—and highly effective—way we use kitchen ingredients in our bathrooms, blending masks from turmeric powder and yogurt, mixing conditioners from coconut and castor oils. “One second—let’s talk about it,” Bhatt says. “Kajal. Eye makeup.” (Kajal is the Hindustani word for kohl.) She reminds me of the practice of rimming our lids with black pigment, regionally called surma, which has roots in Egypt but is an integral part of South Asian culture. For many girls it is the first beauty product they are allowed to use. “Basically, we invented the smoky eye before it came out,” says Bhatt. She recalls a recent TikTok trend in which Gen Z couldn’t seem to get enough of Indian actor Kareena Kapoor Khan’s look in the 2001 film Asoka. She barely wore makeup in the period drama, but her eyes were lined by kohl. “That’s something we’ve been doing for so many years, just that extensive eye makeup. I think that's very personal to India.”

For Bhatt, though, comfort and a certain amount of speed are the biggest beauty priorities. She wants her looks to be accessible, simple. “It needs to be something that you can do very quickly,” she says. “I have ADD and don’t have interest in investing too much time. Whatever needs to happen needs to happen fast.” Which means when she’s in the makeup chair, it’s not for more than 45 minutes. “On my wedding day, my makeup artist Puneet [B. Saini] was like, ‘Alia, this time you need to give me two hours.’ I told her, ‘You’ve lost it. Especially on my wedding day, I’m not giving you two hours because I want to chill.’ ”

Movie stars always have an origin story. Alia’s father, Mahesh Bhatt, is a known filmmaker and her mother, Soni Razdan, is an actor and director. But, Alia says, her core childhood memories are not of spending time on film sets. “I would see them work very hard in their professional life and as parents…. My dad, of course, was very, very busy…[but] my association with films was the time I spent by myself watching movies and TV at home.” She was mesmerized by the big song-and-dance numbers that have defined Hindi cinema. [Editor's note: We are not using the term “Bollywood“ in this story because it's now deemed too reductive to define the vast Indian film industry, which reflects many different languages, cultures, and styles.] “I was fascinated with the people inside this box,“ she says. “They were dancing around in different locations…and having so much fun.”

Bhatt’s first leading role in a film, in Student of the Year, was full of glamour and song and dance, but when she recalls the experience, there is little talk of fun. The movie made her a star at just 18—she went to the audition for director Karan Johar straight from school with her mother. “He had really liked it [the audition],” Bhatt says, but the role involved a lot of prep.

“I trained, I trained, I trained," she says. "Suddenly I was on a diet, and all my favorite things were cut out of it.” She got the part, she finished high school, she went to set. “So when you talk about my Student experience, it was a blur. What I remember was the prep because when I started working, it was too overwhelming. I didn’t know how films were made.”

Later in the conversation we return to this chapter of her life while talking about beauty standards in India, which can be rigid and, especially in the movie industry, Eurocentric (favoring the tall, lighter-skinned, and slim). “I told you about the way I was when I was brought into the movies,” Bhatt says. “I was quite a chubby, healthy kind of kid, very happy with my life at the time. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way I looked.” She speaks matter-of-factly and with surprisingly little judgment of the forces around her, about how things changed when she decided to become an actor. “I have struggled with body-image issues since then. No matter how much weight I lost, I always struggled. My friends would say, ‘Alia, you need to stop dieting. Just be calm, live a little, eat some food.’ And I used to be like, Once a fat kid, always a fat kid. I used to say that in my head, no matter how much weight I lost.”

But something changed while Bhatt was pregnant. “I had so much respect for my body and was so enamored with what it could do,“ she says. ”It made me realize that even though I was in this business, I would never be hard on myself about the way I look or certain extra kilos over here or a certain bloated belly over there.”

During a career that is well into its second decade, comprising 20-plus films so far, Alia Bhatt has given strong, independent female characters to Indian cinema. In the process she has come to fully own an off-screen life in which she unapologetically sets her own standards. Bhatt is comfortable defining herself sometimes in defiance of convention, but always directly and with confidence. As she says: “This is me and this is why.”

Top image: Dion Lee dress. Panconesi earrings and ear cuff. Mam Ring.

Photography:  Scandebergs
Fashion Stylist: Karen Langley
Hair: Ali Pirzadeh
Makeup: Kuma
Manicure: Anisha Mulchandani
Set Design: Yatin Powle
Production: TIAGI
DP (motion only): Amaan Khurana

Originally Appeared on Allure