Actor Shalini Pandey, who has shared screen space with acclaimed names like Shabana Azmi, Dhanush, and Ranveer Singh, says she is grateful for the opportunities she has received and how they have shaped her professional journey.
Shalini made her acting debut with director Sandeep Reddy Vanga's Arjun Reddy in 2017. She later went on to feature alongside Ranveer Singh in a Bollywood film, Jayeshbhai Jordaar (2022).
Additionally, she has also worked alongside Azmi in Dabba Cartel (2025). Her latest work is Idli Kadai (2025) with Dhanush.
"I'm not so calculated. I've really sat down and thought, 'Now, I've to do this'. But sometimes you make those decisions where you want to work with certain people. Like, when I read the script of Dabba Cartel, I was like, it's really interesting. I wanted to work with Shabana Azmi," Shalini told PTI in an interview.
"For every project, the selection is different, like it can be the character, story, directors, and the people that you want to work with. So, some decisions are intuition-based. I'm forever grateful to the universe to get me stuff that leads me to the journey that I'm leading today," she said.
Recalling her experience working with Dhanush, who also serves as director and producer of Idli Kadai, Shalini described him as one of the finest actors.
"He (Dhanush) narrated the script, I absolutely liked it, and wanted to work with him. He's one of the finest actors and a good director. Now that I've worked with him, I can say that he's a very good director...I wanted to collaborate with him on something, and that opportunity came to me, and I was very excited. As an actor who's working with him for the first time, he's very patient with me, I appreciate that,” she said.
The Tamil film features Shalini in the role of Meera, a headstrong and ambitious girl.
Though language has not been a barrier for Shalini, the 32-year-old actor acknowledges that delivering dialogues in Tamil or Telugu can be a daunting task with its own unique challenges. .
"It becomes very difficult. It doesn't come easy to me. It's not just learning those lines and saying them out loud. I like improvising, so you get restricted as an actor to not be able to improvise.
"Though I don't spend a lot of time there, to be there for two months and work with the crew, you want to understand the language because if you only mug up and act, it becomes difficult. Then you've to understand the pauses, the emotion behind each and every word. So, that's challenging," she explained.
Shalini has two more projects in the pipeline, a film titled Rahu Ketu alongside Pulkit Samrat and Varun Sharma, and a slice-of-life OTT series for Amazon Prime Video, about a girl and her fight for freedom.
