3 min readHyderabadJun 17, 2026 09:03 PM IST It has been over 22 years since the Telugu rom com Malliswari brought a soft-spoken princess and a desperate bachelor together on screen, and turned a then relatively unknown Katrina Kaif into one of Telugu cinema’s most talked about new faces. What audiences didn’t see, though, was just how difficult it was to get her there in the first place, or how close the role came to going to someone else entirely. The man behind the decision to cast Katrina Kaif was K. Vijaya Bhaskar, who directed the film and has spoken about how rocky the journey to casting Katrina actually was. Talking about how he had a tough time directing her, he recounted in an old interview with iDream Media, “It was very difficult but what I say is, she’s a very hardworking person.” Pressed further, he painted a picture of an actress working almost entirely from instinct. “She doesn’t even have any body language. Sometimes when she sits, I have to ask her to sit …