Ankit Gupta has described his first feature film role as an education in holding two emotional registers at once, with the actor saying that Tu Hai Meri Kiran forces its cast to move constantly between tenderness and dread. The Hindi romance-thriller, directed by Karan Rawal, opened in cinemas on 23 October 2026 and runs 140 minutes. In it, Gupta plays Riyaan Malhotra opposite Zaheer Iqbal as Samar and Sonakshi Sinha as Kiran Mittal, with Sherlin Seth, Zarina Wahab and Purnendu Bhattacharya rounding out the ensemble as Sakshi, Seema and Mahesh Mittal respectively.

The film's premise turns on a relationship seen from two very different vantage points. The official synopsis notes that what begins as a genuine connection for one character becomes an all-consuming obsession for another. As the romance sours, the line separating devotion from danger erodes. Rawal and his team have layered that psychological descent with mystery elements and a time-travel device, a combination that Gupta said demanded close attention to where each scene sits in the story's chronology. "You cannot play a moment without knowing whether your character is arriving at it for the first time or carrying the memory of it," he said. "That was the first thing I had to learn on set, and it took a while."

For Gupta, a debut in a film that mixes genres comes with particular pressure, since audiences have no prior screen persona to measure him against. Riyaan Malhotra is a supporting principal rather than the central romantic figure, but the role sits close to the narrative machinery that drives the thriller half of the story. He said the part required him to resist playing to the audience's sympathy. "If you start asking the viewer to like you, you lose the character," he said. "Riyaan has to be allowed to be uncomfortable. The moment I tried to smooth him out, the scenes stopped working."

A First Feature Built on Withholding

Rawal's film arrives at a moment when Hindi cinema is increasingly willing to fold science-fiction conceits into relationship dramas, and the time-travel thread in Tu Hai Meri Kiran appears to function less as spectacle than as a way of restructuring how the romance is perceived. Gupta suggested the cast worked from a detailed timeline rather than a conventional script order, so that scenes could be shot out of sequence without losing the internal logic of each character's knowledge. "There were days when I was playing something that happens late, and I had to forget everything I had already performed," he said. "Karan was very strict about that. He would remind us which version of the truth the audience had been given at that point."

According to Gupta, Rawal built the set around conversation rather than rehearsal. The director encouraged the actors to interrogate the script and to flag scenes where the mystery mechanics threatened to overpower the human behaviour underneath. "He kept saying the audience should feel the obsession before they understand it," Gupta said. "That meant a lot of takes where nothing much happened on the surface and everything was happening underneath."

Working alongside Sinha and Iqbal gave Gupta a close view of how established performers manage a two-hander romance under thriller conditions. He described Sinha's approach to Kiran Mittal as unusually practical, focused on what her character wants in each scene rather than on how the audience might read her. "She never played the victim or the mystery object," he said. "Kiran was always a person with an agenda, and that changed how I had to play opposite her." Of Iqbal, he said the on-screen rapport between Samar and Riyaan was built in the gaps between takes. "A lot of what you see between us came from conversations off camera, not from anything written."

The Debut Question

Gupta was candid about the anxiety of a first release. The film carries no meaningful aggregate rating on TMDb at present, and he said he has stopped checking response metrics. "I am trying to stay away from the numbers," he said. "The film is out, people are watching it, and that is the part I can actually do something with." He added that he would rather be judged on whether Riyaan feels like a believable person than on whether the genre elements land for every viewer. "Some people will come for the time travel and leave talking about the relationship, and some will do the opposite. Both are fine with me."

He also spoke about the responsibility of a debut in a Hindi film with a theatrical release, noting that the industry's attention to new faces is intense but short-lived. "You get one introduction," he said. "After that you are just another actor auditioning. I am aware of that." Gupta said he has been reading scripts since the release but has not committed to anything, preferring to wait for material that does not repeat Riyaan's register.

Tu Hai Meri Kiran is now playing in Hindi cinemas.

Source: Filmibeat