She’s hilarious. The Lucknow-born 24-year-old, the star of many a Girliyapa (a YouTube channel) video, will leave you in splits with her spot-on comic timing. t2 called Srishti Shrivastava and laughed all through the chat.

We totally love you! Watching you is a stress-buster…

Thank you very much!

You make people laugh so much. You must be a really happy soul...

It’s a lovely misconception. I am glad people think that way. (Laughs) It’s my job… the kind of work I get, it works with people and they laugh. But I am pretty okay... I can talk calmly and I am also upset sometimes when I am broken up in life!

How did you become an actor?

I knew I wanted to be an actor but I wanted to finish whatever padhai I could finish before going anywhere. I studied mass media at Sophia College for Women and then joined Drama School Mumbai, a theatre school. I started doing a couple of plays. I did 7/7/07 and then another one called Shikhandi. I also did a play with Manav Kaul called Chuhal, which is still running. Then there’s also Final Solutions by Mahesh Dattani and Adrak by Niketan Sharma. My performance journey had started after drama school.

Then one day I got a call to audition for TVF (The Viral Fever, a digital entertainment network). Before that I had been auditioning for a year and had got an ad for Rajasthan Tourism. I went for the audition of Girliyapa (a channel under TVF) and I happened to get my first video which was Mallika Dua and me… Why Should Hot Girls Have All The Fun? This was around 2014-15.

Who made you want to become an actor?

I have been watching a lot of films right from the time I was a kid and only Bollywood… song and dance. I was very influenced by it. I used to watch Madhuri Dixit a lot. I am also a trained dancer (Bharatanatyam). Now there are a lot of other people that I look up to, which includes Irrfan Khan, Nawazuddin (Siddiqui), Manav Kaul… some theatre actors like Faezeh Jalali. 

You come across as completely inhibition-free… any tips?

Oh god! I get really awkward. But I think till college I was not okay with how my body was and not accepting of how I spoke and how I am as a person. Drama School changed my life. Being on stage is just magical and it will always be so. Even if I have three shows a day, every show is new and every show is different. That doesn’t happen in digital or a film platform. The idea is to be naked on stage. You have to be vulnerable. I came out as a new person when I came out of Drama School.

Theatre is the closest to me at this point. I realised how I function, how my body is like, my thought process… you should be absolutely okay with the way you are. We are so just stuck today… we have to be a certain way, talk a certain way, dress a certain way… I am against all of it. Do whatever the hell you want and you will be fine! People will accept you after 10 minutes or 10 days or 10 months. Just be at it! 

Girliyapa has been a game changer for you…

I was extremely nervous while shooting the first video. One, there was Mallika Dua sitting next to me and she is a brilliant woman, right? The entire team was an all-women one, which is also very overwhelming.

A lot of good things happened after Girliyapa. The idea of web is amazing because now it is reaching so many people and our very first video got millions of views. When the video came out, I got a lot of messages from a lot of casting people as well, which hadn’t happened while I was auditioning for them. I got noticed and I started getting calls for films, not for the lead yet. I want to do good stuff in films. As 20 other videos of Girliyapa have come out since, now when I go to an audition space, they are, ‘Hi Srishti, how are you?’ So, they know me by name. It’s given me comfort in the sense that okay, now people know me and how do I go forward.

What is the trick to crack the web code?

It’s very well-thought out… the writing has to be top-notch. You cannot write rubbish because it won’t work. Also, the idea of having real people…that has also made web so big. When we watch films, we are like, ‘Oh god! She is stunning!’ That’s why it’s very hard to feel that you are like her. But when you watch web, you are like, ‘Oh my god, she is exactly like me!’ We are using that idea that we are with you and we understand how you function.