page_title: Bhumi Pednekar
section_title: Early work (2015–2018)
hierarchical_section_title: Bhumi Pednekar / Career / Early work (2015–2018)
caption_attribution_description: English: Bhumi Pednekar at Times Glitter in 2017
context_page_description: Bhumi Pednekar is an Indian actress who appears in Hindi films. After working as an assistant casting director at Yash Raj Films for six years, she made her film debut as an overweight bride in the company's romantic comedy Dum Laga Ke Haisha, which earned her the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut.
  Pednekar rose to prominence by playing headstrong small-town women in the comedy-dramas Toilet: Ek Prem Katha, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan, Bala, and Pati Patni Aur Woh. For her portrayal of the septuagenarian sharpshooter Chandro Tomar in Saand Ki Aankh, she won the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actress.
context_section_description: Pednekar made her acting debut with Sharat Katariya's romantic comedy Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015). Starring opposite Ayushmann Khurrana, she featured as Sandhya, an overweight woman who marries Khurrana's character. In preparation for the role, Pednekar gained close to 12 kg, despite being slightly overweight before filming commenced. Rajeev Masand reviewed, "Pednekar steals the film with an assured turn, effortlessly making you care for Sandhya, without ever reducing her to a slobbering, self-pitying caricature." After filming, she began losing weight and shared methods and tips of the process through her social media. She lost significant weight before the release of the film. The film proved to be a sleeper hit, and Pednekar won the Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut.
  That same year, Pednekar appeared in Y-Films's mini web-series Man's World. The four-part series about gender inequality was digitally premiered on YouTube. After a year-long absence from the screen, Pednekar appeared in the social problem film Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017), alongside Akshay Kumar, which tells the story of a young woman in rural India who insists on the eradication of open defecation. Despite disliking the picture, Saibal Chatterjee of NDTV praised Pednekar for "flesh[ing] out a refreshingly relatable college topper who becomes the principal catalyst for a mini-revolution". With a worldwide gross of over ₹3 billion (US$42 million), it emerged as one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time.
  Pednekar followed the success of Toilet: Ek Prem Katha with Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a satire on erectile dysfunction, which reunited her with Khurrana. Reviewing the film for The Indian Express, Shubhra Gupta wrote that Pednekar "once again reminds us just how convincing she can be as a real honest-to-goodness young woman in search of love", but bemoaned that she was being typecast in such roles. It earned over ₹790 million (US$11 million) against its ₹250 million (US$3.5 million) budget to emerge as a commercial success, and garnered Pednekar a nomination for the Filmfare Award for Best Actress. Her sole screen appearance of 2018 was in Zoya Akhtar's segment in the Netflix anthology film Lust Stories (2018), in which she played a maid who has an affair with her employer. Writing for NDTV, Raja Sen considered Akhtar's segment to be the best among the four films in the anthology, and found Pednekar "hauntingly good" in it.
caption: Pednekar in 2017
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