NEW YORK – Sobhita Dhulipala considers herself an outsider – wherever she is.

She grew up in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, making her an outsider in the country’s financial and fashion capital, Mumbai. Her native tongue is Telugu, making her an outsider in predominantly Hindi-speaking Bollywood.

And now, with last week’s release of the high-octane, Jordan Peele-produced Monkey Man, in which she stars alongside British actor-director Dev Patel, she is again an outsider, thrust into Hollywood’s limelight.

In fact, the premiere of the film at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, in March was the first time Dhulipala had set foot in the United States.

“In India, I’m South Indian,” Dhulipala, who lives in Mumbai, said in a video interview from her hotel room in Los Angeles. “When I come to America, I’m Indian.”

The 31-year-old added: “It’s amazing that I get to come to this country with a film. It’s like I come with an offering.”

That feeling of being an outsider is the undercurrent for many of her on-screen roles. In the Prime Video series Made In Heaven (2019 to present), her character is a low-income nobody who schemes her way into upper-class circles.

In Monkey Man, she plays Sita, a call girl whose business is the pleasure of powerful but despicable men.

To her, being able to make a career out of playing characters on the margins who defy easy categorisation is a point of pride. “Those are beautifully complex humans. To be considered someone who can be trusted with characters like that is an honour.”

Acting was never Dhulipala’s career plan. Her family was full of academics, including her mother, who was a teacher, so she figured she would do something similar. “I didn’t grow up thinking that I would be an artist or some such, it was such an irresponsible thought,” she said. “Being creative was an indulgent hobby.”

She was studying for a master’s degree in corporate law in Mumbai when she first dipped her toe in entertainment by taking on a hotchpotch of modelling gigs and TV commercials.

In 2013, she entered and won the Miss Earth India pageant. As she started landing more jobs, she dropped out of her master’s programme and, in 2016, starred in her first Bollywood film, the psychological thriller Raman Raghav 2.0. She then starred in several Tollywood films – Telugu films made in southern India – before being cast in Made In Heaven.

But it was before she was seeing any success in India, even before the release of her first film there, that she auditioned for the role of Sita in Monkey Man, she said.

It took the team several years to get back to her – she had assumed they had moved on and found someone else – and when the call finally came, in 2019, Patel told her that he had decided she would be perfect for the role from the moment he saw her audition.

Dhulipala said she had been drawn to Made In Heaven in part because the show addressed issues – such as gay rights, colourism and the caste system – that were not typically touched on in mainstream Bollywood hits.

“If something inspires me or there’s some value I can bring to the story, I want to belong with it,” she said.

Monkey Man has just the sort of array of lightning rods that attracts Dhulipala: an enclave of combative transgender women, an anti-establishment sex worker and an anti-police plot.

Working with Patel on his directorial debut could have been a risky move for a Hollywood unknown, but Dhulipala said the dynamic had felt especially collaborative. “It’s a different kind of relationship altogether,” she said. “There’s trust, fear, vulnerability, and you move as one pack, one team.

“There’s a certain purity and passion there – working with a first-time film-maker. So I came on board, I jumped on board.”

Granted, in this film, she barely has a few dozen lines of dialogue. Her character would not pass even a generous version of the Bechdel test, which asks whether a work features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.

Her willingness to buck trends spills over into her style choices too. Early in her career, she recalled being styled by a bunch of people “who probably did not get my vibe so much”, she said. “Because I didn’t really have that much of a voice, I’d just give in.”

But now, she often follows her instincts, leaning into Indian designers and traditional styles. At the Monkey Man premiere in March, she wore a stereoscopic dress designed by Indian designer Amit Aggarwal. In 2023, she walked the runway at India Couture Week in a bejewelled silver lehenga.

“I figured that I don’t have to rely on one person’s vision for me or a stylist’s psyche of what I should look like,” she said. “I can just try things I’m gravitating towards.”

A lot of times, her interest in an outfit or look is laced with nostalgia. “I love a sari because maybe that’s my memory of my mother, my teachers in school. There’s a certain grace and dignity, but also sex appeal.”

In keeping with her unconventional choices, Dhulipala has her eye on either science-fiction or more action movies. But in the next film, she wants to do more of the action herself, she said. And perhaps a little more talking too. NYTIMES

• Monkey Man is showing in Singapore.