By Annapoorna Virdi | PGP 2016
The first time I walked onto an ad film set, I did what I always do in a new environment. Scanned the room. Mapped who did what. Identified the decision-maker. Makeup, hair, lights, direction — I had the org chart decoded in about four minutes.
The only problem was I had no idea how to carry myself in it. I knew my role. I just hadn’t figured out yet what that looked like from the inside — and for someone who’d spent a decade in consulting, where decoding a new room fast was most of the job, that was new.
It started with a one-month workshop at Actor Prepares — Anupam Kher’s institute — meant as a low-stakes experiment. One workshop led to another with actor Neeraj Kabi, then immediately into one run by casting director Mukesh Chhabra. When Mukesh Chhabra himself asked me to come work with his team, it felt genuinely surreal. I had gone from wanting to dip my feet into acting training to sitting inside the office of arguably the biggest casting director in the country.
And then I became an intern.
This was the most disorienting part — not because the work was beneath me, but because I was suddenly the most “experienced” person in the room by every metric that had previously mattered, and the least useful person in it by every metric that actually mattered here. I could see inefficiencies everywhere. My consulting brain didn’t switch off. At one point I built a detailed tracker for a campaign that involved auditioning over 500 actors for a Mahindra XUV project — actor profiles, audition stages, casting and director notes, budget expectations, availability. Essentially a project management tool. In that office, it wowed people. By consulting standards, it was a basic Google Sheet.
That moment told me something useful: I wasn’t starting from nothing. I just had to figure out what I was bringing, and to what.
Before I started auditioning, I did something that every consultant does on a new engagement: I set boundary conditions. A defined financial runway. A time horizon. Clear criteria for when I’d reassess. It sounds clinical for something as instinct-driven as acting. But knowing your walkaway point is not a lack of commitment — it’s what makes it possible to go all in while you’re in. It also kept me from the open-ended drift that makes career breaks feel scary from the outside.
Four months inside the casting ecosystem taught me one thing clearly: casting directors need something to react to. Much like clients need a slide of analysis to push back on. So I started making self-shot performance reels — low budget, slightly experimental, designed to show range. I treated the reel like a product and ran a small GTM around it: identify the right casting nodes, get noticed, convert cold outreach into inbound auditions.
One reel was a bit absurd — what if Hermione Granger grew up to be a 30-year-old working in the Mumbai equivalent of the Auror Department? A casting associate came across it, reached out, and asked me to audition for a project. I recorded it, sent it off, and left for a trip the next day — at a point where I had genuinely prepared myself to wrap this phase and return to freelance consulting.
The call came while I was away. I’d been selected. It was an Urban Company ad. My first project. My 48th audition.
That number matters. A director friend had told me early on: audition at least 75 times before expecting anything real. In my earlier career, competence had a shorter feedback loop — you could usually tell within weeks whether you were on track. In acting, you can go forty-seven rounds without a single signal. The discipline required isn’t talent. It’s the ability to keep moving without external validation — to fall down, get up, move to the next audition, and not over-attach to any one outcome.
That’s not a soft skill. That’s rigour. Just a different kind.
Rejection, interestingly, never hit as hard as I expected. Partly because by the time my first project came through, I had already mentally decided I was done. When the wins did start coming, the losses were easier to absorb — I’d already processed the worst version. And what I’d learned from inside the casting ecosystem was that selection often had nothing to do with the quality of your audition. Fit, timing, brief changes — so much of it was outside your control. The only variable you owned was showing up again.
During training, we were told: you are an actor the moment you start. The work will come. But for me, that framing never quite landed. I needed proof of work. The day I stepped onto that first ad film set was the day I started calling myself an actor — not before.
There was a quieter discomfort running alongside all of this. Acting, from the outside, looks like a departure from seriousness — especially to a network that had known me as a consultant. The validation structures I’d relied on for years simply didn’t exist here. I started feeling isolated at points. What helped most was writing about it: documenting the process, demystifying what an audition actually looks like, making the ecosystem legible for people who couldn’t quite picture it.
Over time, the machinery started working. I worked across 15+ commercials — IKEA, Hyundai, WeWork, Kurkure, and others. I acted in a London Film School project and a few other indie productions that went on to screen at international festivals, including BAFTA-qualifying selections. I was the primary character in an OvaNews campaign alongside Sonam Kapoor. And in what I still consider one of the stranger sentences of my professional life: I shared an ad film set with Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma for a London shoot.
The thing worth naming, wherever you are in your career: the unconventional path doesn’t ask less of you. It asks differently. There’s no rubric, no cohort benchmark, no performance review. What you build instead is a different kind of infrastructure — internal metrics, self-imposed accountability, the ability to generate momentum from within rather than from external structure. I came out of this chapter less of a perfectionist, more comfortable with uncertainty, and considerably more proactive. Less waiting for permission.
Creatives from a campaign with Reliance Jio Mart.
I’m now stepping into a strategy role at a major British retailer — a return to structured professional life, and a deliberate one. I moved to London in late 2024 and spent time exploring acting here too: signed with a talent agent, auditioned for commercials and BBC projects, and quickly understood the market dynamics. Accent, visa constraints, proximity to local casting networks — my “right to win” in this geography, at this point, was limited. The portfolio needed rebalancing.
And so, in some ways, I am beginning again. New country, new organisation, new room to decode. The difference is that I’ve done this before — I know now that not knowing where you fit is just the first chapter, not the conclusion. Acting continues on the side. And the creative itch that this whole chapter opened up? I’m now channelling it into building @annather.life on Instagram — where I’m documenting the non-linear path, the portfolio life, and what it looks like when your cohort went one way and you went several others.
The sabbatical wasn’t a detour. It was a different kind of training ground. One I’d recommend to anyone with the appetite for it — and the honesty to go in without knowing what they’ll find.
