My name has always been like that. I haven’t changed it for the movies!” Nidhhi Agerwal tells t2. The leggy Bangalore girl makes her Bolly debut with the dance film Munna Michael, opposite throb Tiger Shroff.

In Munna Michael, Tiger’s Munna rises from the slums of Mumbai to become a famous dancer inspired by his idol Michael Jackson. The film, directed by Sabbir Khan, has Nidhi in the role of a go-getter dancer. And it has Nawazuddin Siddiqui shedding his serious image to play a don who wants to dance!

A t2 chat with 24-year-old Nidhhi who hopes the audience “will be kind” to her when the film opens on July 21. After all, her Twitter bio also says, “Be kind!”

You’ve come in for quite a bit of praise with the trailer and songs of Munna Michael. That must be a high! 

(Laughs) I feel we’ve done a good job. Sabbir Sir (Khan, the director) has really aced it, I feel. But the reactions have been better than expected. As a team, we are extremely happy. The best thing is that people are saying that this doesn’t look like it’s my first film. I want to clarify that this is very much my first film… and I am completely clueless (laughs)! But I am so happy that people are saying that I look confident. And this is the only thing that Sabbir Sir told me before we started shooting… he said, ‘I just want people to see how confident you are… don’t let the nerves show’. 

Is it true that as a teenager you saw Aishwarya Rai on a hoarding and decided that you wanted to be an actress?!

(Laughs) Ya, ya! I have always been a filmi kid… I was obsessed with watching TV, morning to night (smiles). I would sit in front of the TV and watch the same movie a hundred times! I just wanted to be inside that TV set. I think it sounds very cliched, but I would go into my room and behave like those characters I would watch. I have done all these stupid things.

Though I was filmi, I come from a very simple middle-class family from Bangalore. I had never seen filmstars or been on a film set before this film. But at the back of my head, I knew it would all magically come together one day (laughs). 

So how did this film happen?

It’s a dream debut, especially for someone like me who doesn’t have film connections. No one in my family does anything creative, forget about being in films! (Laughs) Two years ago, I finally gathered the courage to move to Bombay and I started working on myself… I joined some classes. I have always been a trained dancer… I did ballet for many years. I started going for some auditions, not too many, but then I heard about these auditions… I went and cleared it!

I think I fit my character Dolly perfectly and it was pretty easy for them to choose me (smiles). Like me, Dolly has big dreams and a big heart. She’s learnt to be street-smart to get her way around in life. Only the way we speak is different and as a person, she’s louder than I am.
    
And though you are a trained dancer, did you get nervous matching steps with Tiger?

Oh ya! (Laughs) I had to work really hard to be able to be just about decent when I was dancing in the same frame as him. Tiger, I think, is the best dancer we have in the industry. His style is very different and his speed is something else. When we jump while doing a dance step, we just jump… when Tiger jumps, he reaches the ceiling! (Laughs) He’s superhuman! I did a lot of rehearsals just to ensure we looked good together in the same frame.

Is he a collaborative co-star?

Very! He’s helped me so much, I can’t tell you. I am so happy I got a co-star like him. I had no idea about the technicalities — I had never even done an ad before this film! — and when I went on set, I was clueless. I didn’t even know the meaning of ‘mark’ on the first day of shoot, which is the most basic thing. Tiger really helped me… he would explain things to me before every shot and we got along really well. 

And it must have been a blast seeing Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a gangster who wants to be a dancer. We haven’t seen him do that before! 

(Laughs) We hung out during the making of the movie and I got the sense that he had a lot of fun playing this character! He was doing all this for the first time, too, and he was having a blast. He never came with the baggage of ‘I am Nawaz… look at me… I am a method actor’. He would quietly sit in front of the monitor and give his shots, but he would also chat up with us. He’s a very nice human being. 

The nerves are definitely at play, but you must also feel confident that Tiger and Sabbir have together delivered hits like Heropanti and Baaghi before this… 

Definitely! I am in safe hands because Sabbir Sir has this sense of what people want to see. He’s also very calm… I never saw him scream on set. That’s important because as a newcomer I knew I would make mistakes, but his attitude assured me that I wasn’t going to be yelled at.

Tiger has become such a huge star with just three films. The kind of fan following he has is just crazy. We couldn’t shoot in some places… girls would go mad! People want to see more of him and that works for our film as well as for me.