Some things you don’t plan to say. They just come out, mid-sentence, while you’re sitting across from someone with a microphone pointed at you and the cameras rolling. That’s more or less what happened when Mrunal Thakur sat down with Ranveer Allahbadia recently, and the name Ranveer Singh came up.
She didn’t build to it dramatically. She didn’t frame it as a heartfelt industry tribute. She just said it. He is the reason she exists in this industry at all. Full stop, no qualifier, no footnote.
That kind of statement lands differently when it comes from someone who has genuinely earned her ground. Mrunal didn’t walk into Bollywood through a famous family or a filmmaker boyfriend. She came through television, through the audition grind, through years of “not quite yet” before the screen finally said yes. So when she credits someone else with changing the shape of her career, it’s not a PR move. It’s a receipt.
The story itself is deceptively simple. Early on, still finding her footing, she got the chance to shoot a hair brand commercial with Ranveer Singh, directed by Shakun Batra. That ad did well. It got seen. And the people who saw it started paying attention to the girl in it too. Filmmakers noticed. Auditions turned into callbacks. Callbacks turned into films. One commercial, the right people watching, and a career that had been quietly waiting in the wings finally walked into the light.
What she took from the experience wasn’t just visibility, though. She talked about his energy on set, the way he simply refused to operate at anything less than full voltage. You can’t be dull, she said. You walk onto a set, and you bring something with you. Ranveer apparently didn’t just model that lesson. He made it impossible to miss.
Truth is, watching someone work at that level has a way of recalibrating your own internal meter. You realise what’s actually possible and how much further you can push without breaking. For a young actor still building her instincts, being in the room with that kind of intensity, even just for a commercial shoot, is the sort of thing that stays with you. Mrunal clearly let it stay.
She also spoke about his recent work in Dhurandhar: The Revenge, and this is where her observations got specific enough to be interesting. She wasn’t throwing around general praise. She talked about depth. About layers. About the fact that Hamza Ali Mazari didn’t feel like a hero being played by a star, but like an actual person you couldn’t quite look away from. That distinction matters. A lot of actors who headline Rs 1,000 crore films get praise that sounds like stadium cheering. Mrunal’s praise sounded more like something you’d say quietly, after the lights came back on.
And the film has genuinely earned the scale of its conversation. Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge, directed by Aditya Dhar, crossed Rs 1,000 crore net domestically in 18 days, becoming the first Bollywood film to ever do so, joining only Baahubali 2 and Pushpa 2 in that particular club. Worldwide, it has cleared Rs 1,600 crore. The records kept falling through March and into April, each one more absurd than the last. North America. BookMyShow ticket records. Second-week numbers that most films would be thrilled to post in week one. At some point it stopped feeling like a box office report and started feeling like a cultural event.
But here’s the thing about Mrunal bringing Ranveer up right now, in this particular window of time. She has a film releasing in two days. Dacoit: A Love Story, opposite Adivi Sesh, with Anurag Kashyap in the mix as well. April 10. The film was originally going to open on March 19 until it quietly, and wisely, stepped aside when Dhurandhar 2 confirmed the same date. Smart move. You don’t want to be the film that opened against that particular hurricane.
Dacoit isn’t built for safe crowds. It’s a revenge drama, emotionally driven, shot simultaneously in Hindi and Telugu, and it centres on a man who comes out of prison after being betrayed by the woman he loved. Raw material. The kind of story that either lands completely or doesn’t quite make it across the finish line. From everything in the trailer, the bet feels calculated, but also genuinely felt. Mrunal’s character isn’t decorative here. The betrayal is hers to carry, too.
Which is consistent, actually, with how she’s moved through her career since that first commercial changed things. Sita Ramam wasn’t a safe choice. Jersey wasn’t flashy. Even her television years had a quiet stubbornness to them, a refusal to vanish into the furniture. She keeps picking roles that ask something real of her, and then she delivers the real thing back.
Honestly, that’s what made the moment with Ranveer Allahbadia worth paying attention to. Not the name-drop, not the industry warmth of it. The fact that she said it simply, without needing it to perform as a statement. A person helped her. That person is now one of the biggest stars in Indian cinema. And she wanted to say so out loud, while the cameras were rolling, in the same week her own film was about to open.
There’s a generosity in that, maybe. Or just a rare kind of honesty. Either way, it’s the sort of thing you remember long after the interview clip stops trending.
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Sana has been covering film, fame, and everything in between for over a decade. From red carpets to rehab rumors, she brings nuance, wit, and an insider’s edge to every story. When she’s not reporting, she’s probably watching Koffee With Karan reruns or doom-scrolling celebrity IG feeds.
