CINEMA & BEYOND | COVER STORY

Ten years, three industries and zero regrets.

In an industry where actors are told to say yes, stay visible and never let a good offer walk out the door, Rajisha Vijayan built her career on the opposite instinct.

Take the Hindi films she turned down early on. Some went on to become commercial successes, but the characters felt too close to work she had already done. Safe, bankable, expected. She walked away.

“It would look like just an extension of something else I’ve done before,” she says. There is no regret in the admission. “The character was done well, but I’m sure if I had done it, it would not have been received that well.”

Ten years on, across Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu cinema, little about her filmography repeats itself. That, it turns out, is entirely by design.

Quality Control

This instinct goes back to something almost stubbornly simple: quality over quantity, applied as rigorously to her filmography as it once was to her study hours.

“I never believed in studying for so many hours and not taking rest or having playtime,” she says. Whatever time she gave something, she gave it fully before returning to the rest of her life.

Acting works much the same way. “It’s not about increasing your filmography. I just wanted to leave a mark with each work, probably not even with the audience, maybe just for me.”

Repetition, for Rajisha, carries its own danger. Do the same thing long enough and fatigue settles in; the work becomes boring and interest begins to disappear. “You can’t have the same food every day.”

She is equally clear about the work required to prevent that fatigue from showing on screen. Rajisha does not consider herself a natural actor.

“I’m definitely not one,” she says of the born-actor myth. “I am somebody who has to put in the hard work, who needs to do the homework, study, research and observe. Then I become an actor.”

The refusals, then, are less an act of confidence than an act of discipline. She understands that there are limits to how often an actor can make a similar character feel new and believable. Saying no protects both the work and her appetite for it.

The Spark Test

Ask what produces the “spark” she keeps chasing in a script, and Rajisha resists a tidy answer. A compelling narration alone is never enough.

“Some people are not great storytellers, but they are beautiful scriptwriters and brilliant filmmakers,” she says. Even if a narration works only halfway, she will still read the material. The reverse can also be true: an excellent narrator may be disguising a script with little substance. For Rajisha, reading and understanding the material remain essential.

Most often, the spark comes from a story that insists on being told, a character she wants to inhabit or one so different that it demands a new process from her.

“If you subtract my character from the script, the script won’t work,” she says. “If the character is important, it’s contributing—regardless of how much screen time you have.”

Sometimes, the attraction lies in the filmmakers themselves. More often, it is an amalgamation of story, character, relevance and purpose.

It explains why her Tamil filmography, in particular, reads like a register of urgent and uncomfortable Indian realities: caste discrimination, tribal displacement and the machinery of injustice, alongside commercial films she takes to maintain a balance.

“Everything has politics,” she says. “There are things that you want to tell, or come across as.” A script that conflicts with her values is difficult to accept, regardless of its prospects.

Then comes the line that undercuts any suggestion of calculation: “Before you choose a character, it has to choose you. The first selection process is not even me doing it.”

The Rajisha No One’s Written Yet

What she resists most is a shape—not only the shapes she has already occupied, but those others might impose on her.

Ask whether she has a dream genre, and the possibilities stretch in several directions. A recent role allowed her to attempt a small amount of action, but she would like to explore it further. She has appeared in period films set in the 1980s, yet wants to travel deeper into history—and forward into imagined futures.

“I want to tell the story of everybody—today, yesterday and even from the future,” she says.

She refuses to set her own limits when the industry will provide enough of them. “There are a hundred different things that people will limit me for: ‘How will she suit this character? How will she pull it off?’ I don’t want to put that on myself.”

The woman known for socially serious, emotionally intense roles is also harbouring, by her own admission, “a very dark sense of humour”—one no filmmaker has been bold enough to write yet.

She loves comedy and is an unapologetic romantic. In a post-pandemic cinematic landscape crowded with hate, violence, gore and true crime, she finds herself asking a simpler question: where are the films built around love, humour and hope?

She misses the easy swoon, the rom-com, the chick flick and the film you watched simply to have a good time. After carrying her share of politically charged and emotionally demanding characters, she would welcome a set filled with laughter.

There is another part of herself she hopes to reclaim. Dance was once a childhood joy, but somewhere along the way, surrounded by exceptional dancers and constant comparison, her confidence slipped.

“Maybe I’m not good enough,” she remembers thinking. Now, she is consciously trying to remove that inhibition and considering returning to dance classes. She will take it to the screen only when she feels prepared. As with acting, enthusiasm must be followed by training.

Behind the Camera

Rajisha’s interest in cinema was never confined to performance. A film studies student in Delhi, she has long been fascinated by what happens through pre-production, post-production and behind the camera.

She wants to direct someday and is already considering writing something, although she refuses to attach a premature deadline to either ambition.

“Direction is the hardest job in the world when it comes to filmmaking,” she says. “There is so much you have to focus on.”

For now, she knows that acting has its own clock. Certain characters available to her today may no longer arrive ten years later, so she is trying to honour the present without abandoning what might follow it.

“I don’t want to jump and do something which I wouldn’t be proud of or wouldn’t want to show to the public,” she says. “I will take my time and gather the knowledge and confidence to do it.”

The Return Trip

Four or five times a year, Rajisha disappears. Somewhere else, someone else’s language, someone else’s weather. It often happens the moment a shoot wraps.

“I need to break that. I need to come back to myself, my own world,” she says.

Travel is restoration, but it is also research. Watching how other people live complicates assumptions she might have carried from home. Something considered wrong in one place may be entirely accepted elsewhere. Travel, she says, rewrites you, removes inhibitions and makes the mind more expansive.

One trip each year, however, is not an escape but a return. Growing up in an Army family meant seven schools, seven cities and seven sets of friends she left before she had finished making them. Now, she deliberately revisits one of those states and reconnects with the people she knew there.

When the mood arrives, she writes poetry. Somewhere further ahead is a larger passion project: bringing filmmaking and travel together, perhaps through a travel film.

On screen, she will not play a version of herself twice. Off it, she keeps returning.

What She Carries Home

Rajisha rarely leaves a film set empty-handed. From every production, she keeps a costume, an earring or another small object connected to the character.

“I steal from all my sets,” she jokes, quickly clarifying that she asks before taking anything.

The physical souvenir is only one part of the ritual. She also writes letters to her characters and creates playlists for them. Long after a shoot ends, finding an old costume or accessory in her wardrobe can return her to the people, place and emotional life surrounding that film.

A set, for her, resembles a new class in a different school. For 45 or 50 days, its people become friends, colleagues and nearly everything in between. Then everyone says goodbye, sometimes without knowing when—or whether—they will meet again.

Objects make those departures less absolute. Her instinct for preservation extends beyond cinema: she still has the wrapper from a Dairy Milk chocolate given to her by her first crush.

In an age that stores memory inside phones, Rajisha remains attached to what can be held. Letters, handwritten notes and postcards matter because they contain evidence of someone’s time and effort. Fittingly, she still stays away from much of the digital rush: she does not use WhatsApp and says she has not adopted ChatGPT.

The First Permission

Her willingness to choose an uncertain route began long before cinema. Rajisha once wanted to study medicine before moving towards journalism and media studies. When that change demanded a new direction and considerable expense, her parents did not force her back towards the safer option.

“They just said, ‘Yes, okay. If that’s what you want to do, you do it.’”

Their trust created what she calls a “positive added pressure”—not the fear of disappointing them, but the desire to prove their support worthwhile.

That experience shaped how she thinks families should speak to young people. Conversation, she argues, matters more than command. Children must be recognised as individuals whose abilities and aspirations may be entirely different from those of their parents.

Equally important is permission to fail.

“We fail every day in different aspects,” she says. Yet failure carries such stigma that children can begin to believe one setback has closed every door. A healthy relationship is one in which a child knows that, whatever happens, they can return home and speak without fear.

Her parents did not agree with everything, but they listened. That certainty gave her the confidence to bring difficult experiences to them, knowing they would stand beside her. Their support helped prevent those experiences from becoming burdens she carried alone.

“Each time your parents support your wings for the good things, it gives you this added fuel to actually conquer it and do your best with it.”

Staying After the Spotlight

There is a version of success Rajisha Vijayan could have chased easily: more films, more visibility, a face on every second poster. She has had the offers. She still gets them. She simply is not interested in that scoreboard.

“I didn’t want to exist just for five or seven years, do maximum work, make maximum money, fame, whatever, and then leave,” she says. “I wanted permanence in the industry.”

That permanence may eventually extend beyond acting—to writing, directing or a project where cinema meets the road. The precise form remains unresolved, but the intention is clear: she wants to remain part of Indian cinema without rushing towards work she cannot stand behind.

That is the throughline, whether she is refusing a familiar role, relearning a dance step, writing a letter to a character or walking back into an old classroom. Every choice serves the same bet: that being specifically, unmistakably herself will matter more in the long run than being available to everyone, all the time.It is a slower kind of ambition. It might be the only kind that lasts.