Kirti Kulhari Interview: On ‘Four More Shots Please!’, working with women filmmakers and finding her footing

Actor Kirti Kulhari is fairly content as her popular show, Four More Shots Please! is coming to an end with the recently released fourth season. She feels that there is no sense of incompletion. “There is excitement as the new season is coming after a couple of years. But there are no jitters in me as to how it will be received. It has been a long association with the entire team and I am happy,” she says.

When the first season of the show released in 2019, the streaming space in India was still exploring the new avenue of storytelling. So, when Kirti was offered the show, it seemed like a new territory to her as she had started to establish herself as a serious actor with films like Pink (2016), Indu Sarkar (2017) and Blackmail (2018). She was hesitant to take it up initially.

“I had always wanted to be on the big screen and that’s what I had done since I started my career. Going into the streaming space felt like a plunge to me. But when I look back, I feel grateful to have done the show,” Kirti says. “It was a role that people didn’t expect me to do. They had not seen me in this ‘glamorous’ avatar. So, it made people look at me in a different light”.

The actor has gone through a long process of finding her footing in movies. When she started out, her introduction to cinema was through the commercial films, and that’s what shaped her approach when she starred in comedies like Khichdi: The Movie (2010) and Sooper Se Oopar (2013). Soon, her palette grew wider as she began navigating beyond the mainstream and began watching a string of foreign films. With the 2016 evocative courtroom-drama, Pink, Kirti started getting recognised for her acting chops. At the same time, she also developed strong opinions about “massy films”.

“I couldn’t see myself in that space where there was hardly any role as a woman and all you had to do was look pretty and dance,” she says, adding how her judgment of such films made her feel ‘closed’ as an artist. She credits Four More... for helping her break that barrier as she explored a different medium. “I felt a bit constricted before. There was this feeling inside that I have so much more to offer. I was not feeling expansive as an artist. Four More Shots Please! changed that in many ways,” she says.

Kirti carries the creative freedom to this day, as seen in her choice of films in 2025 where she starred in R. Madhavan’s small-town comedy, Hisaab Barabar, Himesh Reshammiya’s over-the-top massy spectacle, Badass Ravikumar and Tannishtha Chatterjee’s layered drama, Full Plate. “Now, I think I have proven myself as an actor with all the ‘meaningful’ and ‘serious’ stuff while also doing some fun films and shows. In a way, I am just opening myself to everything without having judgements and opinions,” Kirti adds.

What is also particularly special about Four More... and Full Plate is that these are stories told by women filmmakers. Kirti agrees that the experience of working with women directors is different.

“If I have intimate scenes or if I am wearing some revealing clothes, it helps to know that you are being looked at with a gaze of support,” Kirti says. “When we are working with women, our starting point is the same and we are on the same page from day one. We have experienced similar things in different ways throughout our life, so the connection is already made. There is a sense of abandonment and camaraderie that we are in this together, that we are not telling two different stories from two different perspectives,” she says.

When asked if there is a certain character or a type of film that she won’t like to be a part of, Kirti says that there are no strong parameters as such. “When you decide to do a particular project, there are multiple factors at play, whether it is your own head space or how excited you are about the story. So, it is difficult to say that I won’t do something. I am just open to represent as many people, as many characters and their different variants,” she says.

At the same time, Kirti believes that it is important for actors to have a conscience while selecting films. However, she says that she is answerable to herself for her choices than to others. “It may happen that I will be criticised or trolled for something that I end up doing. But beyond the idea of what is expected of me, there is a Kirti who I need to satisfy. So, if I choose something which people think of as a misuse of my position and power as an actor, I will have my reasons to do it. I won’t expect the world to understand it,” she concludes.