Kiara Advani: “Motherhood expands you. I’ve never been more ambitious”

Joy, I’ve learnt, is rarely the fireworks we’re promised. It slips in through the cracks instead: the soft exhale of a child drifting off to sleep, the quiet of a set after the last light is adjusted, the moment a woman stops asking for permission to be who she is. It is not spectacle as much as it is stamina, a tenderness that shows up when the day has scraped you thin.

It is this kind of joy I am thinking about on a blush-gold November afternoon at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios. The building has seen everything—heartbreak and heroism, reinvention and ruin, comebacks and collapses. But as I push open the heavy metal door of Stage 2, the air seems to vibrate with something gentler. Not the manic, adrenaline-fuelled energy of a blockbuster set, but a softer hum.

Inside, 30 people are choreographing the kind of chaos that only looks effortless in the final frame. A stylist balances a tray of bubblegum bows like a Parisian patissier. A production assistant yells for safety pins, someone else for more blush. The lighting crew wrestles a massive diffuser that sways like an indecisive cloud. In the centre of it all, calmly seated in a pastel chair, serene amidst the storm, is Kiara Advani, in her first photoshoot since becoming a mother last July. But make no mistake, this is not an actor ‘coming back’ from maternity leave—her most recent film, War 2, was one of 2025’s most anticipated releases, and an ambitious bilingual film is slated for a March release. Advani’s work has continued, the momentum never fully broken. Her life, it seems, has widened, and her selfhood has expanded to make room for it.

A day later, the bows are zipped into garment bags, the lights at Stage 2 have cooled to a metallic sleep. Some­ where else in the city, a four-month-old baby has been fed, rocked and tucked into a cot. When Advani appears again, it is inside the small blue rectangle of a late-night Zoom window. The frame is intimate, unadorned: beige wallpaper, a simple white shirt. Perhaps it is this stripped-back palette that pulls the next words out of her. “Pink was my first language of joy. Pink ribbons, pink hairbands, pink flowers, pink dresses. It was everywhere when I was little,” she smiles, aware of how easily the colour is dismissed. “People think pink is fragile, but softness isn’t the opposite of strength. It’s one way of being strong.”

On set at Mehboob Studios, this softness manifests when she remembers to thank the light boys by name. When she checks whether a young assistant has eaten. When she asks if everyone can take a break at the same time. “I grew up around women who looked out for each other,” she tells me now. “My mum, my school friends, my teachers. I naturally gravitate to that energy.”