For a few years, Alia Bhatt had been considering her Hollywood possibilities. She had been interested in filming an English-language film for over a decade and had amassed about 79 million Instagram followers as a result. However, nothing had been working out. After hearing about a new action series that Gal Gadot will be leading and producing, Bhatt quickly made a deal after reading the script. She reasoned that it was fate.
“Your first film chooses you,” Bhatt said in an interview with The Associated Press in June. “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 Friday on Netflix. Bhatt’s role as a tech prodigy named Keya is one that’s hard to describe without spoiling the twisty plot, but it’s an important one. In India, the actor 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.
She reviewed the script to make sure her part wasn’t merely there to fill a “South Asian” slot and that she was actually a part of and had an impact on the plot.
“The way I judge it is if you take the character out of the story and you still have a film, then that character’s not important,” Bhatt said.
She was most thrilled to be second to a woman who was also producing, though. Tom Harper, the film’s director, described Bhatt as having “formidable talent” and noted that what most intrigued him about the movie was the interaction between Keya and Gadot’s character, Rachel Stone.
“The two bounce off each other brilliantly and you get real electricity, ” Harper said. “Some of my favorite parts of the movie are when they riff off each other and the banter that they have.”
The primary difference between Hollywood sets and the ones Bhatt has worked on for a decade in India is the number of hours. On “Heart of Stone,” the breaks were shorter but the days were longer. She explained that there would be a longer finish time and an hour for lunch as well as 30 minutes for snacks in India.
She was also pregnant during the shoot and was tickled to see some of the things she “did” in the finished film (with the help of stunt doubles and digital effects). “I’m like, ‘Wow, I did that?'” she laughed. “I don’t think so, but it looks like I did.”
The 30-year-old has had a successful year that included the birth of her first kid, attending her first Met Gala, and being selected as the first Indian house ambassador for the prestigious fashion business Gucci. The publication of “Heart of Stone” brings to a close her successful year.
