Raashi Khanna, popular for her Telugu films, is making her Tamil debut in Imaikka Nodigal. The film’s shoot largely took place on the campus of a major university in Chennai. As Raashi was new to the Tamil industry, she was quietly getting comfortable, learning her lines and slowly starting to get to know the cast and crew. It all would have been pretty boringly diplomatic, if not for a common interest among everyone on the sets. “During one of the breaks, I noticed my co-star Atharvaa drinking coffee out of a Game of Thrones coffee mug. I asked him if he liked the show, as it’s one of my favourites too, and we immediately got talking about it,” she says.

Later, Raashi noticed that in between breaks, Atharvaa, Ramesh Tilak and Rebecca would all be intently watching  something on the laptop. “I learned they were watching the final episode of the last season. As Atharvaa now knew that I loved it too, he asked me to join them. We bonded instantly over the show and it was great fun, even though we could only watch it in bits and pieces due to work in between.”

Raashi’s celebrity status in Telugu cinema fetched her quite a few compliments while she was shooting in the campus. “Some of the students began speaking in Telugu with me. They had watched my Telugu films and wanted to click selfies,” she says. “We shot for days on end, and kept awake by having endless tea and coffee!”

Raashi wasn’t the only actor on the sets nervous about her Tamil lines. Her co-star, Anurag Kashyap, who plays the villain, was even more anxious. “We bonded over it, and were eager to get the dialogues right. Given how nervous he was on the first day, I was amazed at how he managed to mouth his lines so well eventually,” she says.