“Why Do You Cast the Same Faces for the Same Roles?” — Taapsee Pannu Has a Question, and Bollywood’s Top Directors Have No Good Answer

On Assi, Ten Years of Building a Career Outside the Comfort Zone, and the Specific Price of Not Being the Industry’s Default Choice

Taapsee Pannu in Assi film poster with face paint and trailer text 

Taapsee Pannu does not complain. She diagnoses. There is a meaningful difference — one is an emotional release, the other is a structural observation that requires the listener to either defend their position or examine it — and in a conversation with Galatta Plus while promoting her latest film Assi, the actress made clear which mode she was operating in. The question she says she has taken into meetings with “certain top directors” — “Why would you want to take the same faces for the same roles?” — is not rhetorical. She expects an answer, and in 10 years of navigating Bollywood as someone who started neither as a commercial heroine nor as a film family product, she has found that the industry does not have a satisfying one.​

The Comfort Zone That Costs Other People Opportunities

Taapsee Pannu in patterned shirt with forest background 

The specific mechanism Taapsee is describing — the one she calls “complacency” — operates in a way that makes it invisible to those who benefit from it and conspicuous to those who do not. A director imagines a character. The character has a type. The director’s imagination, shaped by what they have seen work before and what their social proximity makes readily available, produces a shortlist of two or three names who have played that type before. The director casts one of them. That actress delivers what she has already delivered — because the role is the role she has always been given — and the cycle reinforces itself one more time.​

Taapsee described this loop with the precision of someone who has sat in those director meetings and felt the shortlist forming without her name appearing on it: “Nobody wants to really think out of the box. It is not that if I have to be there, it has to be an issue attached with it. I really question them. Why would you want to take the same faces for the same roles? It is unfair to them as well. It is unfair to people like me who would want to experiment with their craft. It is your complacency as a director to only think that oh — this is a certain type of character, and who looks like this? Only these girls! Then they are only going to bring what they have brought to the table in some other film.”​

The argument is not only about fairness to Taapsee — it is about the creative poverty of a system that casts for recognition rather than possibility. When a director repeatedly casts the same actress in the same type of role, they get confirmation of what they already know. When they cast Taapsee in that role, she says, they get something they could not have predicted from the casting decision alone.

Two Battles She Fights in Every Meeting

She named two specific barriers she has to dismantle in director meetings before the conversation about the actual role can even begin. The first: the assumption that if Taapsee Pannu is in a film, she must be the lead and the story must be about her — an assumption she finds limiting in both directions, because it means directors rule her out for supporting or ensemble work that would allow her range to show. The second: the assumption that her screen presence requires social weight — that a Taapsee Pannu film must carry an issue, a cause, a serious subject — leaving no room in the casting imagination for her to do something lighter.

Both assumptions, she argues, reflect the industry’s tendency to typecast actors not only into character types but into tonal categories — you are the serious actress, you are the commercial heroine, you are the drama specialist — and then refuse to revisit that categorisation regardless of what the actor demonstrates they can do. The acknowledgement that she is actively seeking lighter, more commercial roles — having built her entire reputation on demanding, issue-driven work — is itself the demonstration of the range she is arguing she should be given the chance to show.​

The Dunki Moment: What a Decade of Hard Choices Earned

The most honest statement in Taapsee’s recent interviews about her career is the one she made to SCREEN — that a film like Dunki (the Rajkumar Hirani-directed Shah Rukh Khan film in which she starred) is not something she can expect to get on a regular basis and is not something she could have expected at all without the 10 years of choices that preceded it.

“A film like Dunki is difficult to get for someone like me because I’m not some commercial, mainstream, viable heroine,” she said. “I got it because that role probably needed someone like me. That’s what I’ve been told. That’s because I did films like Assi and Gandhari before. This is what has given me my space and identity in the industry.” The logic is both the reward and the trap: the unconventional choices built the identity that got her Dunki, but that identity simultaneously makes her the first name a director reaches for when the role is difficult and serious, and the last name they reach for when the role is anything else.

She described her career trajectory with the self-awareness of someone who has thought about it from multiple angles: she began in South Indian cinema with Maasty Films, entered Hindi cinema with David Dhawan (a commercial-entertainment-first director whose films have no issue attachments), then built her reputation working with Anubhav Sinha and Anurag Kashyap — a directorial range that, she says, proves she can operate across registers. The audience that found her through Pink, Thappad, Mulk, Manmarziyaan, and Haseen Dillruba is a loyal, specific audience — small by blockbuster standards, but, in her words, earned: “I’m glad I’ve earned those people’s trust. Not every actress has that privilege. So, this is my home ground.”​

Assi: The Film That Started This Conversation

Assi — directed by Anubhav Sinha, released on February 19, 2026 — is the film at the centre of these interviews, and it is the film that simultaneously proves her argument and limits her. A courtroom drama in which Taapsee plays Raavi, a fiery advocate representing a gang-rape survivor (played by Kani Kusruti, All We Imagine as Light) brutally assaulted inside a moving SUV and dumped on railway tracks in Delhi, the film is by almost universal critical consensus her best work to date.

The Federal’s review called her performance “magisterial,” noting specifically that she “balances the crusading dialogues and rousing speeches with moments of well-chosen, well-performed vulnerability” — that Raavi is “a flawed and sometimes even neurotic human being,” not a courtroom superhero, and that Taapsee “nails” the scene where black ink is flung across her face outside the court premises: “the shock, the hurt, the anger all intermingling expertly on her face”. The Indian Express awarded the film 3 stars, describing it as “totally and deliberately in your face”. The New Indian Express gave it 4 stars, calling it “scathing and unsettling”. Hollywood Reporter India noted uneven storytelling but acknowledged Sinha’s attempt at social urgency. Baradwaj Rangan described it as “a powerful melodrama that offers a three-dimensional take on rape” and Sinha’s best work to date.

The ensemble around her — Kani Kusruti, Revathy, Manoj Pahwa, Kumud Mishra, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Satyajit Sharma — with guest appearances from Seema Pahwa, Supriya Pathak, and Naseeruddin Shah — places Assi in the tradition of Sinha’s ensemble social dramas (Mulk, Thappad, Article 15) that use individual cases to interrogate systemic failure. The specific failure Assi examines is the legal system’s handling of sexual assault cases — the bribery, evidence tampering, witness intimidation, and procedural collapse that sit between a survivor’s statement and a conviction.

Gandhari: The Next Chapter

Waiting in the release queue is Gandhari — directed by Devashish Makhija (Bhonsle, Joram), written by Kanika Dhillon (their sixth collaboration), and starring Taapsee as a mother on a relentless mission to find her kidnapped daughter. The film was shot in 50 days across Mumbai and Maharashtra at what Taapsee described as “breakneck speed,” and she has characterised it as one of the most physically demanding projects of her career. Set for Netflix release, Gandhari marks Taapsee’s return to action after nine years and extends the pattern of unconventional choices — a revenge drama directed by one of Hindi cinema’s most uncompromising independent filmmakers — that she is simultaneously proud of and recognises as the source of her typecasting problem.

After Gandhari, she has indicated she intends to pivot toward something lighter — a comedy drama — which would be the most direct possible answer to the directors who think she can only do issue-based films. The genre pivot, if she can get the opportunity, will either confirm the argument she has been making in meetings or confirm the industry’s resistance to revising what it thinks it knows about her.

The Outsider Question: Still Open After Ten Years

The observation Taapsee has been making — in various forms across her career — about the structural disadvantage of building a career without industry connections is not a simple nepotism complaint. She has been specific and nuanced about it: she has acknowledged that star kids have a unity among themselves that outsiders lack, that outsiders tend to be more competitive with each other than supportive of each other, and that the hustle culture of the outsider produces its own form of insecurity that can prevent the kind of collective solidarity that would actually help. She has said, more than once, that the audience’s role in the dynamic matters: that outsider success requires the audience to buy tickets, advance book, and show up with the same commitment they extend to star kid launches.​​

What she is adding now — in this week’s Assi interviews — is the layer that sits above audience choice and below the casting decision: the imagination of the directors themselves. The casting shortlist that forms in a director’s mind before a single meeting has happened, before a single audition has been considered, is the room where the opportunity either exists or does not. Taapsee’s argument is that she has walked into enough of those meetings to understand the list she is not on, and she wants the directors who made the list to explain the logic of its formation — not to complain, but because the logic does not survive scrutiny, and she suspects they know it.​

“When I do something like that, I will bring something new to the table,” she said. It is both a promise and a challenge. And Assi — in every review that calls her performance “magisterial,” “powerful,” “spectacular” — is the current answer to whether she can back it up.