It’s been 22 years since Sonia Agarwal made her acting debut in Selvaraghavan’s Kadhal Konden. All these years later, Sonia lives by her three-point formula — work in roles she believes in, draw boundaries when needed, and strive to achieve success in all her roles. She is among the handful of female stars in a male-dominated industry to continue to feature prominently in film posters. Discussing her longevity, Sonia says, “The constant love from the audiences made me reach this position. It feels good, and I am blessed to consistently receive good scripts. Honestly, I never wanted to do a ‘normal’ character from day one of my career. I have always played a strong female lead, even if there was an equally big hero basking under the limelight. Be it Divya, Anitha or Angel, my roles are always layered and deep.” In fact, Sonia shares that this pursuit of such roles started right from her critically acclaimed debut performance in Kadhal Konden. “Once you have established yourself as an actor who plays meaningful characters, you can’t go back to working on ‘normal’ roles. I had to become a conscious actor,” she explains.
The culmination of it all has landed on Will, her upcoming film, where she sits on the elevated judge’s seat for the first time in her career. “I was nervous to wear the coat,” shares Sonia, crediting director Sivaraman, a lawyer himself, for getting the nuances of a courtroom setting right and extracting the exact performances needed for the film. “Sometimes, there is a chance of directors missing a few details in films like these. However, Will is carefully constructed since the director has experienced living in such a setting. Crafting roles like lawyers and doctors requires meticulousness as they are strong personalities. While wearing their uniforms, we need to respect these roles,” she notes, adding how her brother and composer Saurabh Agarwal had developed tunes aligned to these themes.
Early on in her career, Sonia Agarwal had benefited from being part of several films that have gone on to become cult classics in Tamil cinema—Kaadhal Kondein, 7G Rainbow Colony, Thiruttu Payale and Pudhupettai. Recalling memories from these films, she points to how Pudhupettai, starring Dhanush and herself, changed how people looked at films. “It greatly influenced how the audience looked at films. It taught people in the industry to utilise their resources to make wonderful films. If we could do this film without the technological advancements that we have now, imagine the potential that we hold in our hands now,” she reflects, adding, “Similar to Pudhupettai, I continue to always look for roles where women are strong. She can be naïve, but there needs to be an unshakeable inner strength in her.”
