Social media content creator Ahilya Bamroo — known for mimicking different accents, playing the guitar and performing songs spanning different genres — made her acting debut with Shoojit Sircar’s Abhishek Bachchan-starrer film I Want To Talk, which opened to positive reviews on Friday.
The 22-year-old content creator, who plays Abhishek’s daughter in the film, enjoys a massive fan-following on Instagram with 461K followers. Fluent in French, English, Bengali and Hindi, Ahilya draws inspiration for her content from her upbringing in Pondicherry’s Auroville.
In one of her early videos about the “famous sounds of Auroville”, she explored the various quirks of tourists and locals in and around the experimental township. “Just immortalising this on my feed,” Ahilya captioned the reel, which paved the way for her future videos, many of which garnered several thousand views and likes on the platform.
Ahilya came into her own as a content creator with an accent challenge in which she pronounced Indian names with a French accent. The video instantly gained popularity for its showcase of multiculturalism with a hint of humour and sarcasm, garnering 7.5 million views.
“For some background: I grew up in Pondicherry and went to a French medium school for a number of years,” Ahilya wrote in the caption of the video, which was followed by more hilarious skits showcasing her love for accents.
For Ahilya, Netflix’s Never Have I Ever, a series that follows Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s Indian-American teenager navigating high school and romance, is a perfect watch. Following the release of the third season of the show, which introduced Anirudh Pisharody’s Des, Ahilya posted a video mocking the actor for pronouncing his name with an American accent. The video received a staggering 13.2 million views and 7,90,000 likes.
Being a self-taught guitarist, Ahilya has covered songs by Taylor Swift in different accents — French, Irish, British and Spanish — in a video with actor-singer Sai.
After a short break from her accent videos, Ahilya came back with a video on Sabrina Carpenter’s song Please, Please, Please in different accents. She imitated Shakira’s signature style of singing in the video.
Following the release of I Want To Talk in theatres on Friday, Ahilya took to her Instagram and shared BTS pictures with Abhishek and Johnny Lever. In a long note, she thanked her “forever inspiration” businessman Arjun Sen, whose 30-year-long struggle with cancer and the impact it had on the people around him inspired the film.
Directed by Shoojit Sircar, I Want To Talk revolves around Abhishek Bachchan’s chronically ill character, Arjun, who seeks to make amends as he faces the final chapter of his life. His daughter, played by Ahilya, supports him after his unexpected medical diagnosis leads him to undergo various surgeries.
