Deepika Khanna has a confession to make about the way she chooses projects: she doesn't always read them. The actor, who features in the newly released "Lust Stories 3," said she agreed to join the anthology's segment directed by Vishal Bhardwaj before she had any idea what the story contained - and she would do it again without hesitation.

"Lust Stories 3" arrived on September 18, 2026, continuing the franchise's format of four self-contained short films that circle around lust, love, relationships and repressed desire. The anthology runs 165 minutes and is fronted by an ensemble that includes Radhika Apte as Padma, Konkona Sen Sharma as Shonali Ghosh, Vijay Varma as Hemant, Abhishek Banerjee as Debendu, Ali Fazal as Varun Apte, Radhikka Madan as Sailee Vaidya, Aditi Rao Hydari as Saira and Siddharth as Badru. Vikramaditya Motwane takes the director's chair for the overall film, which is a Hindi-language Bollywood production classified under the romance and drama genres.

In an exclusive conversation, Khanna explained that her decision came down to one name. According to her, the opportunity to work with Bhardwaj outweighed any need to first understand the part she would be playing.

"There was no question of reading the story first," she said. "If Vishal sir calls you, you say yes. The script can come later."

That instinct, she suggested, is rooted in the body of work Bhardwaj has built over the years rather than in any single script. Actors, she added, tend to know what they are signing up for when his name is attached - even when the details remain a mystery.

Khanna also pushed back gently at the idea that not reading a story is unprofessional. She described it as a form of trust, one that has to be earned by a filmmaker over a long career. "Trust is not blind," she said. "It is built. And with some directors, it is already built."

The anthology format itself can heighten that sense of surrender. Each segment in "Lust Stories 3" is a compact, emotionally dense piece, meaning performers have limited screen time to establish character and stakes. For actors, that compression can be either a constraint or a liberation. Khanna indicated she saw it as the latter.

"You have fewer pages, so every moment has to carry weight," she said. "There is no room to coast. That is the exciting part."

The "Lust Stories" series has functioned as a showcase for Hindi cinema's most respected directors since its first edition, pairing them with casts that move fluidly between mainstream and independent work. The latest instalment keeps that model intact, with Motwane overseeing a project that hands four separate narratives to four filmmaking voices while holding them together under a single thematic roof.

Bhardwaj's involvement in this chapter has been among the most discussed elements of the release. Known for adapting literary material and for a muscular, often dark visual style, he is the kind of director whose casting announcements generate their own headlines. That reputation helps explain why an actor might commit before reading a word.

The film's ensemble reflects a similar philosophy of mixing proven collaborators with performers audiences associate with different registers. Apte, Sen Sharma, Fazal and Rao Hydari have all worked across arthouse and commercial cinema, while Varma, Banerjee, Madan and Siddharth bring their own followings to the table. The result, early viewers suggest, is a set of segments that vary widely in tone while staying loosely tethered to the anthology's core preoccupations - intimacy, longing and the things people do not say out loud.

"Lust Stories 3" has landed with a TMDb rating of 6.5 out of 10, a middling score that suggests audiences are dividing over which segments work and which do not. Anthologies often attract that kind of split response, since each viewer effectively watches four different films and responds to each on its own terms.

For Khanna, the response to the finished product is almost secondary to the experience of making it. She described the shoot as brief but intense, and said the compressed timeline suited the material. "Short films do not give you time to overthink," she said. "You arrive, you work, you leave. It keeps you honest."

Whether or not audiences agree on the segment's merits, her approach raises a broader question about how casting decisions actually get made in an industry where name recognition and personal relationships carry enormous weight. Reading the script, it turns out, is only one path into a role - and not always the most common one.

"Lust Stories 3" is currently streaming, with its four segments running as a single 165-minute presentation.

Source: Filmibeat