For Poonam Gurung, who appears as Ulupi in The Family Man 3, the journey to a mainstream web series has been long, uneven, and shaped largely outside Mumbai’s traditional pathways. In an exclusive interview with News Ei Samay, she reflected on her journey across industries, the freedom she found in regional cinema, and the long road that led her to one of India’s most popular web series.
Having worked on Hindi, Bengali, and other projects, Gurung says that regional cinema played a decisive role in shaping both her craft and the kind of actor she wanted to become. “I am not a trained actor,” she says. “For me, auditions and working on set was like a film school.”
She began her career in Mumbai, where acting, she says, happened “quite accidentally”. After a period of auditions that yielded no results, her first major break came through Bengali cinema.
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“When I did Khoj, it really liberated me,” she explains. “The storytellers there really know how to write characters for the kind of look we have.”
She then recalls that many of her Mumbai auditions were narrowly defined. “Every other script I was auditioning for was about this North Eastern person who was facing racism, and it would end with one monologue,” she says. “But in films like Khoj or Nirontor, it’s not about that. We are just characters.”
That distinction, she says, mattered deeply. “It shaped me as an actor and also helped me understand what kind of roles I want for myself.”
Drawn to intimate, offbeat stories
Gurung’s work in short films like Chinese Whispers also reflects that preference. The 2015 film follows a schoolgirl from the Northeast navigating stereotypes on her first day at a school in Maharashtra.
“When I auditioned for it, it hit me straight to my heart,” she says. “The girl explains that North East is not far. It’s in the same country. People know more about America than about us.”
She adds that while the film touches on prejudice, it does so quietly. “It was done very beautifully,” she says, crediting filmmaker Charu Shree Roy.
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With fewer opportunities and a reluctance to accept stereotypical parts, Gurung says projects like Chinese Whispers or Mushroom offered space to perform. “There are only a few characters where you actually get to act,” she says.
Movement, stamina and screen presence
Before acting full-time, Gurung trained as a dancer and later in martial arts, skills that continue to enhance her screen work.
“When you do background dancing, you train for eight or nine hours,” she says. “That builds stamina. When you shoot action, you’re doing retakes all day.”
She sees action on screen as choreographed movement. “Screen fight is like dance choreography,” she says, referencing Jackie Chan. “It’s just beats—one, two, three, four.”
Those disciplines have also helped her recover from injury. After injuring her knee during a stunt, Gurung says physical training played a key role in her recovery. “After practising calisthenics and martial arts, it healed and made me physically stronger,” she says.
Entering The Family Man universe
Despite having spent nearly a decade in the industry, Gurung approached The Family Man 3 with limited expectations.
“We are sold the dream of one-night stardom,” she says. “That dream of mine slowly faded away.”
But after she got selected, what stood out on set, she recalls, was the absence of hierarchy. “Manoj sir and Sharib were really sweet,” she says. “They never made us feel like outsiders. They made us feel like home.”
She adds that performing alongside senior actors felt natural. “He made us so comfortable that it was never difficult to act with him.”
When the series released on November 21, Gurung did not anticipate the response she got from people. “I started receiving messages from people everywhere,” she says. “They took time to write long messages and I’m really grateful for that.”
Growing up between places
Born in Nagaland, raised across Nepal and Siliguri, Gurung says constant movement shaped her worldview. “I kept travelling since childhood,” she says. “It helped me adapt and kept my mind open.”
As a child, she was a daydreamer. “Every day I used to imagine getting into different professions —a pilot, a police officer,” she says. She further said that she realised that the only way to fulfil all those dreams was perusing acting as a career. 'Being an actor you can be whatever you want," she said.
Later during the conversation, she admits that she never imagined becoming an actor initially. “You don’t see people like you on screen,” she says. “That’s why representation is very important.”
On cinema and the Northeast
When asked about how the Northeast is portrayed in mainstream storytelling, Gurung is pragmatic. “If I’m a storyteller, I’ll first look at what’s on the surface,” she says. “It depends on what the story needs and based on that the storyteller will dig deeper.”
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She notes that in The Family Man, North Eastern characters are not positioned as antagonists as a whole. “That was deliberate,” she says. “We are helping the main character and the militants that have been shown portraying negative character serves the story well and that's why they have been added."
On asking whether cinema can change perceptions, she says, “Cinema plays a major role in influencing how people think, but you can’t expect that from everybody.” Concluding the conversation, Poonam says she is working on her writing her own autobiography right now along with other upcoming projects.
