Birthday Special: Inside Sheena Chohan’s Wildly Diverse Upcoming Slate

There’s a birthday, and then there’s a birthday backed by six back-to-back projects spanning three languages, two continents and one very demanding shooting schedule. That’s the kind of year Sheena Chohan is walking into.

The pan-Indian actress, known for picking parts that refuse to repeat themselves, has quietly built a line-up that reads more like an actor’s dream board than a typical release calendar - a cop thriller, a mythological horror series, a festival drama shot in the mist of Cherrapunji, and a Cannes premiere or two thrown in for good measure.

What ties it together isn’t genre. It’s process. Chohan has built a reputation for treating every script as a starting point rather than a finished character - she researches, shadows real people, sometimes trains physically for months before a single shot is filmed. Here’s what she’s bringing to screens next.

The Cop Who Isn’t Written on Paper

In the pan-India thriller Jatasya Maranam Dhruvam, opposite J. D. Chakravarthy, Chohan plays a police officer - but instead of leaning on genre clichés, she spent time shadowing an actual policewoman in Mumbai, watching how she carried herself on and off duty. The backstory she built from that observation, she says, is what let the performance feel lived-in rather than performed.

A Demon Rooted in Old Mythology

Bhaayava pushes her furthest from familiar territory - she plays a she-devil drawn from the Lilith myth, the biblical figure cast out of Eden. Chohan dug into historical and literary readings of the character before layering in an imagined emotional history of her own, aiming for something that feels less like a monster and more like a wounded origin story.

A Traveller Who Mirrors Her Own Life

Nomad, directed by Darren Lexton, follows a woman defined by constant movement. This one hit close to home - Chohan is an avid traveller herself, and she supplemented that lived experience with documentaries and travel writing to shape a character searching for meaning on the move.

A Ghost Looking for Closure

Shot in the fog-drenched hills of Cherrapunji, Justice - directed by Bappaditya Bandopadhyay - casts her as a ghost searching for her own coffin across one of the film’s three interwoven stories. Chohan says the character took shape almost organically on location, built more on instinct and silence than dialogue.

A Village Woman, Rebuilt from the Ground Up

For Arjunain Allirani, she plays Rani, a Dalit woman from rural Tamil Nadu - and the prep is the most physically demanding yet. Beyond adding stick-fighting to her existing brown belt in martial arts, Chohan has been living in Tamil Nadu villages, sitting in on workshops, and studying local singers to get the body language right before cameras roll.

Two Cannes Premieres, Two Difficult Stories

Rounding out the year are One More and Amar Prem, both of which premiered at Cannes. In the former, a psychological thriller, she plays a woman confronting sexual violence; in the latter, a housewife caught in a complicated love triangle. Both roles, she says, demanded she sit with the emotional weight of women navigating systems stacked against them.

“Birthdays always make me pause and feel grateful,” Chohan said, reflecting on the year ahead. “What excites me the most is that every upcoming release allows me to step into a completely different world and play characters that are so unique from one another.”

With six projects spanning that much emotional and physical range, it’s hard to disagree.