Bollywood actress Alia Bhatt on Netflix film Heart of Stone with Gal Gadot, her Hollywood debut, and why friend Priyanka Chopra is ‘brave’

Alia Bhatt, a Bollywood star with nearly 79 million Instagram followers and a decade’s worth of acting experience, has made her Hollywood debut on Netflix

She talks about how ‘your first film chooses you’, growing up in a Bollywood family and why Priyanka Chopra is ‘an inspiration to every young girl from India’

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Alia Bhatt in a scene from “Heart of Stone”. The Bollywood superstar with nearly 79 million Instagram followers has made her Hollywood debut. Photo: Netflix via AP

Published: 11:15am, 11 Aug 2023

Alia Bhatt had been weighing her Hollywood options for a few years. A popular star of Hindi films for over a decade with nearly 79 million Instagram followers, she had been interested in making an English-language film, but nothing had been working out.

Then Bhatt got word of a new action franchise led and produced by Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot, and within a week of reading the script the deal had closed. It was, she concludes, fate.

“Your first film chooses you,” says Bhatt. “Technically, this is my first English-language movie. It chose me and I’m so happy it did.”

Heart of Stone, a globe-trotting spy thriller co-starring Gadot and Jamie Dornan, debuts globally on August 11 on Netflix. Bhatt’s role as a tech prodigy named Keya is one that is hard to describe without spoiling the twisty plot, but it is an important one.

Bhatt in a scene from “Heart of Stone”. Photo: Netflix via AP

In India, the actress had grown accustomed to being a lead, but here she was happy to delve into a more supporting part – as long as it had substance to it.