After foraying into movies with Mumbai Matinee in 2003, Dandekar—then a leading VJ—was seen in a handful of films. She says that her short acting career had as much to do with her expectations as with the industry. “When you’re at the top of something, you don’t want to be at the bottom of something else. I was happy in my career as a VJ. At that time, if you chose something wrong, you would get [typecast] easily. Today, that old-school thought of boxing people has gone away, thanks to OTT. That said, it’s not like my phone was buzzing with offers [then], and I wasn’t excited about the ones I got.”

Today, Dandekar is happy to see that people enjoy the freedom to pursue different careers and mediums. “[Earlier], people would say that VJs didn’t make good actors. Have we not seen Ayushmann Khurrana rise as a phoenix? We also have Aditya Roy Kapur and Cyrus Sahukar.”