Winning Miss World at 20 is quite the career head start. For Manushi Chhillar , it was also a passport to a world far bigger than pageantry. Almost a decade later, she is navigating acting, fashion and entrepreneurship, learning that life after a crown comes with its own plot twists, and not all of them are scripted.
But it is the story’s ability to keep audiences guessing that seems to have won her over most. If there is one thing she has learnt along the way, it is to trust her gut. When she first entered the film industry, the excitement of being new came with an eagerness to listen to those who knew the ropes. It is a philosophy that has proved useful in an industry where even the most well thought-out plans can come with a question mark. Without the backing of a film industry family, she points out, there is no guarantee of what comes next. “You don’t know when you’re going to be starting your next film. It’s not like someone’s sitting and creating a project for you. For a newcomer, waiting for the perfect role can be a luxury few can afford. Sometimes, the sensible move is to take a project that gets you through the door rather than wait outside for the role of a lifetime. “So, not every project has to be the dream job. Sometimes, it just has to get you closer to it”. Her Miss World win also gave her something more tangible than a global platform: financial independence. Brand endorsements helped support her during the early years of acting, giving her the freedom to build a career without putting all her eggs in one cinematic basket. Entrepreneurship is now another way to create a safety net of her own—one that allows her to keep pursuing acting without asking every role to pay both the bills and the emotional dividends. Her upcoming film with Vikrant Massey is one project that has her particularly excited. She describes it as one of the most interesting scripts she has read in Mumbai, and the experience has offered a behind-the-scenes education of its own. The production involved sophisticated technology she had not encountered on previous projects, prompting her to pay closer attention to the mechanics of filmmaking. “Till the very end you would. If the film delivers on that promise, audiences may want to keep their theories and their phones aside until the credits roll.
But experience, she says, has taught her that too many opinions can sometimes drown out the one that matters most: her own. “It’s such an unpredictable profession,” Chhillar says. “I might have felt then, ‘I don’t have the luxury to sit at home and wait for a big filmmaker to write this role specifically for me’,” she says. You are going to keep guessing, and it’s only in the last few minutes when you realise what exactly is going on,” she says.
