Adah Sharma is preparing to make her Marathi cinema debut with the upcoming film Gajra, and the actress says the ambition traces back to a piece of advice her father gave her at the very start of her career. Speaking about the project on 16 July, Sharma revealed that her father's words have quietly shaped her approach to every film she has chosen since.

The Advice That Started It All

When Sharma first told her father she wanted to pursue acting, his response was unambiguous. 'When I told my father that I wanted to become an actress, he said, 'You should do one film in every language in India'. Each state has its own culture, each language has its own intricacies,' she recalled. He added, she said, that mastering a new language and persona with each film would be 'a great challenge' — and a worthwhile one.

That philosophy has visibly guided her career. Since her 2008 debut in the Hindi horror film 1920, Sharma has worked in Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada productions, steadily building a multilingual filmography that few actors of her generation can match.

Why Marathi, Why Now

Sharma described her reasoning for stepping into Marathi cinema in characteristically direct terms: 'I've always wanted to work across languages. Good stories don't come with subtitles — they come with great characters.' Gajra, directed by Shreyas Jadhav and based on true events, is set to release in 2027.

Notably, this is not merely a commercial calculation. Sharma has consistently framed her multilingual choices as artistic ones, pointing to the layers that each regional language brings to a performance.

The Pan-Indian Identity She Has Built

Asked whether a successful Gajra would push her toward more Marathi projects or keep Bollywood as her anchor, Sharma pushed back against the framing entirely. 'I've always seen myself as a pan-Indian actress,' she said.

She pointed to her own body of work as evidence. The Kerala Story, she noted, was a Hindi film with roughly 60 percent of its dialogue in Malayalam, 10 percent in English, and 30 percent in broken Hindi. In the action franchise Commando, she plays a Telugu girl despite the film being in Hindi. And in her very first role, she portrayed an Anglo-Indian character named Liza.

Open to Everything — Human or Otherwise

Sharma's ambitions, she made clear, extend beyond language. She said she is open to playing anything 'human, non-human also', and that language itself is not a limiting factor. 'I would ideally like to take up space in all languages,' she concluded.

With Gajra slated for a 2027 release, Sharma's Marathi chapter is the next step in what has become one of Hindi cinema's more genuinely multilingual careers. Whether the film fulfils her father's advice — one language at a time — remains to be seen.