Priyanka Jawalkar is eagerly waiting her debut film Taxiwala, in which she is paired opposite Vijay Deverakonda. Hailing from a Maharashtrian family, Priyanka is a complete Telugu girl, as she is born and brought up in Anantapur. “My parents settled in Anantapur and I was born and brought up there, and I even completed my engineering there,” says Priyanka. She later joined NIFT in Hyderabad to get herself a diploma in fashion designing and was then approached by a production house. “I thought I’d give it a try, and so I acted in two short films. One of them, titled Possessiveness, went viral,” she recalls.
After her short film stint, Priyanka decided to do a course on data analysis and applied to a few colleges. She got a call from Harvard University. “Many Telugu people started recognising me there, after they saw my short film,” she says. Though always interested in acting, the recognition motivated her to pursue it seriously. “I told my parents about my plans and they said it was up to me,” she shares. “After eight months of college, I decided to come back to India and joined Bikshu and his wife Aruna, who taught me how to act,” she says.
Priyanka Jawalkar
“I decided I’d try acting for a year and if it did not work out, then I would go back to my university as I had to complete my Masters within three years,” says Priyanka. After her training in acting, she auditioned for Taxiwala. “Director Rahul actually approached me for his first film The End after he saw my short film, but I was not interested at the time. He later messaged me about Taxiwala,” she says about her debut. Many Telugu girls are uninterested in a film career, but Priyanka says that this may now change. “In the last 10 to 15 years, we didn’t see Telugu girls, but now I hope it changes,” she says.
When Priyanka signed the film, Vijay was not a star, but now he is and this will definitely help her too. At the film’s audio function, she revealed that she had a crush on Allu Arjun, but the actor jokingly retorted that it was now too late.
HT05
