Sana Thampi didn't set out to make her Bollywood debut a talking point beyond the screen. But midway through our conversation about ‘Lust Stories 3’, her first acting role after 8 years in modelling, she pushed back hard against a question that's been trailing shows like hers all year, are these bold anthologies actually opening up conversations about desire, or just repackaging the same fantasy with a Netflix logo and better lighting?

"Are you insinuating that this is porn-adjacent, and that's why it has to be watched outside incognito mode?" she shot back. "I don't think it's better lighting and the same fantasy whatsoever. The stories very much have a story to it. It is talking about female desire, female agency, a dialogue that women very much want to have in real life, but hesitate to because so much of the dialogue around sex and desire has been male-centric for, I don't know, centuries."

She didn't stop there. "I don't see why someone shouldn't feel comfortable watching this kind of content if you can feel comfortable watching someone chop someone's head off, or smash someone's head in with a hammer and there's gore, and blood, and violence, and rape, shown without any questions being asked. But suddenly when there's consensual sex on screen, I don't understand why people have to feel so scandalized by it."

It's a fair fight to pick, and one the actor seems unbothered about having in her first press cycle.

Also Read: Same wedding night, different nightmare; Is ‘Dhoomakethu’ copying ‘Bhool Chuk Maaf’ or outdoing it?

From modelling to Mumbai, without knowing whose film it was

Thampi's route into ‘Lust Stories 3’ was accidental. She auditioned via self-tape without knowing the project was Kiran Rao's segment of the anthology.

"I would've possibly looked at the script ever so slightly if I'd known it was Kiran Rao's film," she admits, "but apart from that, I didn't really feel much of a difference." Her confidence, she says, came from the material itself, she liked the script before she knew whose name was attached.

The age-gap question, and what 8 years in modelling bought her

Much of the criticism aimed at shows like this and at young-actress-opposite-older-co-star casting more broadly centres on how young the women usually are when they take these roles, often barely past the age where they can sign an intimacy waiver without a parent present. Thampi isn't in that bracket. She came to acting later, after building an independent career and financial footing first.

Also Read: Who is Sana Thampi? The Kerala-born model making her Bollywood debut in ‘Lust Stories 3’

"If a project like this had come to me, say, 5 years ago, I wouldn't have felt this confidence to take it up," she says. "I don't think my parents would've felt easy in letting me do it, regardless of the names attached to it." She separates her own experience from broader criticism "I can't comment on other shows, that's subjective to each script" but is direct about her own case, 8 years in front of a camera, financial independence, and life experience "100% helped in shaping the way I approached this project."

Structurally, that confidence had backup, ‘Lust Stories 3’ used an intimacy coordinator, from a team called The Intimacy Lab, headed by Aastha. "They're one of the first to do this in India," Thampi says. It points to a change worth watching, intimacy coordination is still new to Indian sets, and this is one of the few on-record accounts of how it actually functioned on a mainstream Netflix production.

Writing a woman who isn't centered on the man

Asked what her character Lisa wants outside the man she's paired with, the question scripts rarely bother answering Thampi says it was addressed. "She moved to Bombay because there was something she liked doing. I don't think the man was the center of her universe. She cares about her career, her life, her sense of excitement and exploration." Lust drives the story, she says, "but it's not centered around this guy. It's more centered around the situation."

On whether the story models anything like real sex education, she points to Lisa's agency, "By the end of the film you'd realize she always knew who she was spending her time with. There was never a point where she was being tricked into something she wasn't okay with."

Also Read: Everyone's talking about ‘Lust Stories 3,’ but is the hype deserved?

A joke that deflects better than an answer would

Asked what she'd want a teenager to unlearn if Lisa's story were their first real exposure to desire, Thampi doesn't take the bait. "Let's be realistic. I don't think any teenager's first exposure to desire is going to be Lisa's story," she says. "If at all it is, don't deal in drugs, guys. That's the only lesson to be learned from this story."

It's a decision to hand the discourse back to whoever's having it, and let the work speak for itself. For an actor three weeks into her career, that's not a small thing to know how to do.