Alia Bhatt and the Action-Heroine Bet the Box Office Keeps Refusing

Alia Bhatt

Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 15, 1993 Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Occupation	Actress and film producer
Known for	RRR, Heart of Stone, Gangubai Kathiawadi
Awards	National Film · 6 Filmfare · Filmfare Critics

Alia Bhatt holds a record nobody else in Hindi cinema has: more Filmfare awards for Best Actress than any performer the prize has ever honoured, Nutan and Kajol included. She also spent the summer watching her most expensive solo vehicle, Alpha, become the weakest earner of the franchise it was meant to open up to women. Both facts describe the same actress. The question her career is asking now is whether the woman critics trust with broken and unglamorous characters can also be the one who sells tickets for a spy universe, or whether she has already decided she does not need to.

She arrived with every advantage a Mumbai film family can offer and has spent most of her working life arguing with it. Her father is the director and producer Mahesh Bhatt, and her mother the British actress Soni Razdan. Bhatt has said the upbringing was more modest than people assume, and that she barely knew her father until she became an actress.

Her first screen appearance came at five, as the younger version of Preity Zinta’s character in Sangharsh (1999). At nine she auditioned for Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black and did not get the part. Bombay, where she was born on 15 March 1993, gave her the Jamnabai Narsee School, which she left before finishing twelfth grade to act. The passport she holds is British, a detail that sits oddly beside her place at the centre of contemporary Hindi cinema.

Karan Johar launched her properly with Student of the Year in 2012, on the condition that she lose 16 kilos. The film made money; The Hollywood Reporter called her a washout. Her response set the pattern for everything after. In Imtiaz Ali’s Highway (2014) she played a rich girl who bonds with her kidnapper and won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress. The same year, the Dharma Productions romances 2 States and Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania each passed a billion rupees and made her bankable.

For Abhishek Chaubey’s Udta Punjab (2016) she learned a Bihari dialect to play a migrant labourer trapped by the drug trade, and won her first Filmfare for Best Actress. In Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi (2018) she was a Kashmiri woman who marries into a Pakistani army family in order to spy on it, opposite Vicky Kaushal, and Box Office India called her the most successful actress of contemporary Hindi cinema. Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy (2019), with Ranveer Singh, premiered in Berlin and gave her a third Best Actress trophy, for a girlfriend whose jealousy the film allowed to be frightening.

Then came the stretch she rarely dwells on. Kalank (2019), her most expensive film to that point, failed. Sadak 2 went straight to streaming during the pandemic in 2020 and landed in the middle of the nepotism debate that followed the death of Sushant Singh Rajput. The trailer became the second most-disliked video on YouTube at the time. The surname was only part of the charge. Johar casts her in most of his productions, and critics argue the favouritism costs other actresses their chances. Her own line on it has been blunt: feeling bad, she said, is a small price to pay for work people respect.

Her reply came in 2022, when four releases landed in a single year. As the title character of Bhansali’s Gangubai Kathiawadi, a brothel madam turned power broker in Mumbai, she answered the speculation that she was too slight for the part; the film premiered in Berlin and won her the National Film Award for Best Actress, shared with Kriti Sanon. She had a brief role in the Telugu epic RRR, produced and starred in Darlings for Netflix through her company Eternal Sunshine Productions, and closed the year with Ayan Mukerji’s Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva, opposite Ranbir Kapoor, the highest-grossing Hindi film of 2022. She married Kapoor in April of that year, and their daughter, Raha, was born in November.

The awards record since then deserves a closer reading. Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), which Johar directed, was a hit and brought a fifth Best Actress Filmfare, tying Nutan and Kajol, although several reviewers felt Ranveer Singh had the better part. Jigra (2024), an action thriller she co-produced about a sister breaking her brother out of prison, performed poorly and drew mixed reviews, some calling it one of her weaker performances; it still won her the sixth trophy that broke the record. Her Hollywood debut, the Netflix spy film Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot, was panned. Industry honours and audience appetite have started to measure different things, and the gap runs straight through her recent choice of genre.

Alpha was meant to close that gap. Directed by first-time feature director Shiv Rawail for Yash Raj Films, it is the seventh film in the YRF Spy Universe and the first led by a woman, with Bhatt as Sita, a super-soldier raised in isolation who turns on the programme that made her. Sharvari, Anil Kapoor and Bobby Deol co-star. Before release, commentators questioned whether her frame suited the part. After it opened on 3 July 2026, reviews were mixed to negative, the film grossed about ₹98.6 crore worldwide, and it ended as the lowest earner of the franchise. It began streaming on Netflix on 28 August.

Her other release this year points somewhere else. Don’t Be Shy!, a coming-of-age romantic comedy she produced with her sister Shaheen under Eternal Sunshine, premiered on Prime Video on 25 September. It marks the debut of writer-director Sreeti Mukerji and of its four young leads, Aarushi Bajaj, Piyush Khati, Bianca Arora and Ansh Duggal, and Bhatt does not appear in it. Fourteen years after Johar introduced her, she is the one introducing strangers, which is the most direct answer she has given to the nepotism argument.

Away from the set, she founded the children’s clothing label Ed-a-Mamma in 2022, now majority-owned by Reliance Retail. In 2024 she said she had been diagnosed with ADHD, and Time named her among the 100 most influential people in the world. She lives mostly in Mumbai with Kapoor and Raha.

The next test is back on the big screen and back with Bhansali, the director who turned her away at nine and later gave her Gangubai. Love & War, with Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal, wrapped in September and is due in cinemas on 21 January 2027. In December 2027 she is set to move into folk horror opposite Sohum Shah in Tumbbad 2. Neither is an action franchise, which may be the point.