‘She had no body language’: Director reveals ordeal of helming Katrina Kaif’s Telugu debut

3 min readHyderabadJun 17, 2026 09:03 PM IST

Venkatesh and Katrina Kaif in a still from Malliswari, the 2004 Telugu film that marked Kaif's debut in the industry (Photo: IMDb)

It has been over 22 years since the Telugu rom com Malliswari brought a soft-spoken princess and a desperate bachelor together on screen, and turned a then relatively unknown Katrina Kaif into one of Telugu cinema’s most talked about new faces. What audiences didn’t see, though, was just how difficult it was to get her there in the first place, or how close the role came to going to someone else entirely.

The man behind the decision to cast Katrina Kaif was K. Vijaya Bhaskar, who directed the film and has spoken about how rocky the journey to casting Katrina actually was. Talking about how he had a tough time directing her, he recounted in an old interview with iDream Media, “It was very difficult but what I say is, she’s a very hardworking person.” Pressed further, he painted a picture of an actress working almost entirely from instinct. “She doesn’t even have any body language. Sometimes when she sits, I have to ask her to sit properly. It is because they grew up in a completely different environment. There’s no idea about how a Telugu girl is supposed to be. She should just be a princess, royal and all, but also very respectful and loving,” he said.

Malliswari marked Katrina Kaif’s Telugu film debut, and by his account, that early inexperience never stopped her from putting in the work.

Getting Katrina into the role in the first place was an ordeal of its own. “Actually it was my choice to cast Katrina, so it got really tough for the producer,” Vijaya Bhaskar said, recalling how he had first spotted a different actress in an advertisement and pursued her for the part. “I saw Katrina Kaif in an ad, she was really good. We called her, told her the story, and she said okay. So, we went to Mumbai. Everything was set, however there was some form of disagreement later in the day.” Even an advance payment couldn’t change her mind, he said. “Even when the production team offered an advance, she refused to take it.”

Katrina Kaif as a Malliswari in her debut Telugu film Malliswari.

That setback widened the search considerably. “All the so-called beauty queens were called right here by Suresh Daggubati, literally all of them,” he said, describing a mass photo shoot at Ramanaidu Studio where he found himself fixated on one face among many.

‘Considered Sonali Bendre’

It was somewhere in that long search that Sonali Bendre’s name came up too. “I really like Sonali Bendre. She’s a very professional girl and a really good actor. But I knew she was not Malleswari, because we’ve already looked into that. I’ve already done it myself in Manmadhudu,” he said, referring to the 2002 film he had directed with Nagarjuna and Sonali Bendre as Harika. “Sonali Bendre was everyone’s choice for the role of Malliswari because she was considered the most beautiful and disciplined actress of that era. However, I wanted to cast someone who was a fresh face to Telugu audiences so they would truly feel like they were watching a princess.”