Radhika Apte, the Sacred Games actress who stopped playing Bollywood’s game

Radhika Apte

Photo: Bollywood Hungama / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 7, 1985 Vellore, Tamil Nadu, India
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Andhadhun, Pad Man, A Call to Spy
Awards	Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles Best Actress (shared)

Radhika Apte became the face Indian streaming showed the world, and then she said out loud what the job is really like. “For anyone with an acting career, you are powerless for the most part,” she told Outlook. “You’re choosing from what you’ve been offered.” In the same conversation she announced she was done with the upkeep a Mumbai career demands: the social-media maintenance, the parties, the courting of people who hand out parts. Coming from an actress whose face fronted Sacred Games and Lust Stories, it read less like a complaint than a resignation letter from a system she had never fully joined. Her filmography, read closely, has been saying the same thing for years.

She was born at Christian Medical College in Vellore, Tamil Nadu, where both her parents were resident doctors; her father, Charudutta Apte, later became a neurosurgeon and chairman of Sahyadri Hospital in Pune. The family’s city shaped her more than her birthplace did. In Pune she was partly homeschooled with a handful of neighbours’ children, an arrangement she has credited with giving her nerve, trained in Kathak under Rohini Bhate for eight years and took a degree in economics and mathematics at Fergusson College. The stage came before the camera. She acted with Mohit Takalkar’s Aasakta Kalamanch troupe, did Samuel Beckett’s That Time, and appeared in the English-language play Bombay Black, where Rahul Bose saw her and passed her name to the director Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury.

That tip became Antaheen, the Bengali drama that gave her, at 23, a first lead role in 2009 as a television journalist, alongside Bose and Aparna Sen. What followed was a scatter of languages and budgets: Marathi films with Sumitra Bhave and Sunil Sukthankar, Ram Gopal Varma’s Rakta Charitra, the Tamil Dhoni, the Bengali Rupkatha Noy. Her first attempt at Mumbai went badly. She has described living as a paying guest in Goregaon on theatre wages, and being dropped from a large studio film because she was judged too fat for it. She went to London for a year to study contemporary dance at Trinity Laban, and there met the British violist and composer Benedict Taylor. They married in 2012, and her second attempt at Mumbai stuck.

The breakthrough arrived in small portions. Sriram Raghavan’s Badlapur, in 2015, gave her six days of shooting and one scene that critics kept quoting; Harshvardhan Kulkarni’s sex comedy Hunterrr and Ketan Mehta’s Manjhi – The Mountain Man followed within months. In 2016 she carried two independent films on her own: Pavan Kirpalani’s Phobia, a near one-woman study of agoraphobia that Film Companion later placed among the 100 greatest performances of the decade, and Leena Yadav’s Parched, about women in a desert village, which earned her a best actress prize at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles shared with her co-stars.

Then came Netflix. In 2018 she appeared in Anurag Kashyap’s segment of Lust Stories, played the intelligence officer Anjali Mathur in Sacred Games and led the horror miniseries Ghoul. Lust Stories brought her a nomination for best actress at the 2019 International Emmy Awards. The internet, meanwhile, decided she was in every Indian production the platform released, and the joke stuck so firmly that Filmfare would later call her the poster child of OTT. Honey Trehan’s Raat Akeli Hai, opposite Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and Vasan Bala’s Monica, O My Darling, where she played a police officer with a deadpan streak, extended the run. Lydia Dean Pilcher’s A Call to Spy cast her as Noor Inayat Khan, the wireless operator Britain sent into occupied France.

The mainstream hits tell another story, and it is the less flattering one for the industry. Her biggest commercial successes — Kabali, Pad Man, Andhadhun — placed her beside the man the film was about: Rajinikanth’s wife, the wife of Akshay Kumar’s sanitary-pad inventor, the girlfriend of Ayushmann Khurrana’s pianist. Manjhi had made her a wife, too. The theatrical box office filed her under spouse while streaming turned her ubiquity into a meme, and neither label described the actress of Phobia. When she told Outlook she was tired of supporting parts beside male leads, she was not posing. She was reading her own credits aloud.

The answer, lately, has been to work further from Mumbai. Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight, a British-backed debut that premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2024, gave her Uma, a misfit bride trapped in a one-room Mumbai home, and a nomination for best lead performance at the British Independent Film Awards. Justin Lin’s Last Days, which premiered at Sundance in 2025, cast her as Meera Ganali, the police officer chasing the case of the American missionary John Allen Chau. She also directed a short, The Sleepwalkers, which competed at the Palm Springs ShortFest in 2020, and she has said she intends to direct again. Apte and Taylor had a daughter in 2024; she lives in England and has said some producers now assume motherhood makes her harder to schedule.

India has not let her go. She returned as Radha in a special appearance in Raat Akeli Hai: The Bansal Murders on Netflix in late 2025, and on 18 September 2026 Lust Stories 3 paired her with Konkona Sen Sharma in Vikramaditya Motwane’s segment, a comedy reviewers credited largely to the two women. The bigger test lands on 30 October 2026, when Netflix premieres Akka, a Yash Raj series from debut director Dharmaraj Shetty, set in a fictional 1980s South Indian city run by women gangsters, with Apte sharing the lead with Keerthy Suresh. It is the kind of part she said the industry rarely offers her: a woman at the centre of the frame, answerable to no hero.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, actresses, Radhika Apte, Akka, Andhadhun, Keerthy Suresh

Featured News — Radhika Apte

Movies

Lust Stories 3 on Netflix hands four directors one impulse and lets them disagree

Movies

‘Monica, O My Darling’ – Netflix Movie – Review: Surreal, Fun and Peculiar

See all →

Related People

Alia Bhatt

Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Rachel McAdams

Jaideep Ahlawat

Kristin Scott Thomas

Ajay Devgn