Within the last year, Ananya Panday has emerged as both a Gen-Z star and a conscientious actor lending her face to projects that speak of relevant, new-age issues like the perils of social media and the emerging threat of data leak. In Arjun Varain Singh's "coming-of-digital-age” Netflix film Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, she played a young girl as addicted to her ex-boyfriend as she's to Instagram. In the more recent Prime Video show Call Me Bae , she plays a social media influencer-turned-journalist fighting against a data leak racket.
And in her new Netflix film CTRL, she plays a content creator who uses Artificial Intelligence to delete her ex from her memories, till the AI takes over. (Also Read – Ananya Panday reacts to being called the next Alia Bhatt: ‘It’s a huge compliment’) Ananya on her trilogy “Yeah, they're all very different kinds of films, but you're right in the way that they do talk about, in different ways, how social media has impacted everyone,” Ananya says in an exclusive interview. While Kho Gaye Hum Kahan is a buddy movie, Call Me Bae a “riches-to-rags” story, and CTRL a screenlife thriller, all of them have another common factor – the “Ex” factor.
Ananya's character in all three stories is fresh off a break-up, uses social media to distance herself from the alienation, only to be overcome by her weapon of choice itself. Like heartbreak, social media's existence as an aberration also echoes with every young girl in Ananya's age group. “.