‘Monkey Man’ Sobhita Dhulipala charts an unusual path to Hollywood

Sobhita Dhulipala considers herself an outsider wherever she is.

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

And now, with the release on Friday of Jordan Peele’s “Monkey Man,” in which she stars alongside Dev Patel, she’s back in the Hollywood spotlight. In fact, the film’s premiere at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, last month was the first time Ms. Dhulipala, 31, had set foot on American soil.

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

“It’s amazing to come to this country with a film,” she added. “It’s like I came with an offer.”

This realistic sense of being an outsider is the undercurrent of many of her on-screen roles. In “Made in Heaven,” which is streaming on Amazon Prime, Ms. Dhulipala plays a low-income woman who plans to work her way into upper-class circles. In “Monkey Man,” she plays Sita, a popular girl who is in the business of entertaining powerful but despicable men.

For her, being able to make a career out of playing fringe characters that defy easy categorization is a point of pride. “These are really beautifully complex human beings,” she said. “To be considered someone you can trust with characters like that is a true honor.”

Acting was never Ms. Dhulipala’s career plan. Her family was full of academics, including her mother, who was a middle school science teacher, so she thought she would do something similar. “I didn’t grow up thinking I was going to be an artist or anything like that, it was an irresponsible idea,” she said. “Creating was a fun hobby.”

She was studying for her Masters in Corporate Law in Mumbai when she first delved into the entertainment industry by participating in a mixture of fashion shows and TV commercials. In 2013, she entered and won the Miss Earth India contest. As she started getting more jobs, she dropped out of her master’s program 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 produced in South India) before being cast in the 2019 film Made in Heaven.

But she said that before she saw any success in India, even before her first film released there, she auditioned for the role of Sita in Monkey Man. It took the team several years to get back to her — she assumed they had moved on and found someone else — and when the call finally came, in 2019, Mr. Patel told her he had decided she would be perfect for the job. He fell in love with the role from the moment he saw the audition.

Ms. Dhulipala said she was drawn to “Made in Heaven” in part because the show dealt with issues — including gay rights, colorism and the caste system — that were not typically addressed in mainstream Bollywood films.

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

“Monkey Man” has the kind of set of lightning rods that attract Ms. Dhulipala: an area of ​​militant trans women, an anti-establishment sex worker, and an anti-police plot. Working with Mr. Patel in his directorial debut would have been a risky move for someone unknown in Hollywood, but Ms. Dhulipala said the dynamic seemed particularly collaborative. “It’s a completely different relationship,” she said. “There is trust, fear, vulnerability, and you move as one group, one team.”

“There’s a certain purity and emotion there — working with a first-time filmmaker,” she added. “So I came aboard, and I jumped on board.”

Granted, in this movie she barely has a few dozen lines of dialogue, and her character wouldn’t pass even a generous version of the Bechdel test. (She claimed there was something poetic about depicting “the moments between words.”)

Her willingness to buck trends extends to her style choices, too. Early in her career, she recalled a group of people “probably didn’t like me very much,” she said. “Because I didn’t have much of a voice, I would just give up.”

But now she more often follows her instincts, leaning towards Indian designers and traditional styles. At the “Monkey Man” premiere last month, she wore a figure-hugging dress designed by Amit Aggarwal, and last year, she walked the runway at India Fashion Week in a silver, jewel-encrusted dress.

“I realized that I didn’t have to rely on one person’s vision of me or the designer’s psychology as to what I should look like,” she said. “I can only experience things I’m attracted to.” Often, her interest in dress or appearance is accompanied by nostalgia. “I love the sari because perhaps it is a memory of my mother, my school teacher. There is a certain grace and dignity, but there is also sex appeal.

DietSabya, a fashion and celebrity influencer on Instagram with over 400,000 followers, has named Ms. Dhulipala as one of its top best-dressed picks for 2023. Her style has been a hit with fans as well. The bodycon dress by Sabyasachi that she wore in the second season of “Made in Heaven” prompted the show’s audience to call it the Indian equivalent of the “revenge dress.”

Likewise, in what she said felt like another small act of rebellion, Ms. Dhulipala was embracing her naturally curly hair. “In India, you constantly want to look more put together. So everyone is constantly trying to dry and straighten the hair, and I have been through that journey too,” she said. Now, she added: “I love my hair and the texture of it. Poetry is history, isn’t it? It’s part of your identity.”

In keeping with her unconventional choices, Ms. Dhulipala has her eye on sci-fi or more action films in the future. But she said that in the next film she wants to do more of the action herself. And maybe more talk, too.