Sex Lives of College Girls star Amrit Kaur is ready to lay her soul bare

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Amrit Kaur decided to wholeheartedly pursue her acting career because of a tarot card.

The Sex Lives of College Girls star from Markham, Ontario is almost embarrassed to admit this, because she doesn't typically put any stock in mysticism, superstition, astrology, or religion. And yet …

Kaur was about 25 at the time. She had graduated theatre school and was landing small roles in shows like Kim's Convenience and Nurses while working a day job at her family's insurance brokerage. She had an insurance license and a sense of stability that her traditional Indian Sikh parents found comforting. But then Kaur's friend decided to give her a round with the tarot cards.

"Saraswati came out," she squeals, describing the moment on a Zoom call from Los Angeles, insisting she doesn't believe in this stuff and yet glowing with delight because, of all the cards, she pulled the Indian goddess of art. "It must mean something! My friend was like, 'Amrit, it's time.'"

"The next day I called my dad. I was like, 'I'm not working for you. Saraswati has given me her blessing!'"

Not long after making the decision to chase her art full-time, Kaur landed her breakthrough role: Bela Maholtra in The Sex Lives of College Girls. She stars opposite Reneé Rapp, Pauline Chalamet (Timothée's sibling), and Alyah Chanelle Scott in the saucy, hysterical, and touching HBO Max series created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble.

Kaur's Bela is the eager kid with reserves of joyous optimism but also a surprisingly hard edge. She's breaking free from her conservative parents' expectations, ditching STEM courses so she can pursue a career in comedy, exploring her appetite for sex, and fighting through the disillusionment that young women face — and not always in the healthiest ways.

"I don't realize how much that character has affected people," says Kaur. She recently met an Indian woman who expressed hope that her young daughter can grow up with the near-revolutionary pride we see in Kaur's character, which comes off as a breath of fresh air after all the self-conscious or self-hating immigrant characters we're used to consuming onscreen. "Bela is an ordinary-looking Indian woman who's so in her sexual liberation, so confident, and so in love with who she is."

Kaur adds a caveat: Bela is not a role model, especially during Season 2. She makes mistakes and has a cruelty about her. Much of her behaviour is rooted from a sexual assault and, as Kaur puts it, a subsequent hatred toward men that's boiling beneath the surface. She's someone we admire but also want to see hold herself accountable. And there's a lot of Kaur in that performance.

"There's aspects of myself in everything," says the actor. "If you can't see me in my acting — if my friends aren't like, 'Shit, I didn't know that about you' — then I haven't done my job."

We're discussing Bela along with Kaur's work in The Queen of My Dreams, Fawzia Mirza's charming, masala-flavoured feature debut arriving complete with a Bollywood-style song-and-dance number. The latter is a balm of a movie searching for the connective tissue between two generations of Indian women. As Kaur explains, it's also exploring the anger the daughters of immigrant parents have toward their mothers while seeking their father's approval. She plays two roles: Azra, a queer woman at odds with her family, pressured to suppress who she is while attending her father's funeral in Pakistan; and, in flashbacks, Azra's mother Mariam during her younger years as a firecracker pushing back against her own parents. 

Kaur's characters tend to be the life of the party. The actor has that same vibe, though she regularly interrupts the cheery positivity and friendly ribbing with moments of deep and introspective contemplation. She's constantly interrogating her characters, her performances, and even herself, questioning whether there's more of her soul she could have laid bare. 

I'm often taken aback by how vulnerable and forthcoming she is, and yet she feels it's not enough. "I have high expectations," she says, thriving for an intimacy and honesty in her work like a Buddhist working toward nirvana. Whether it's an attainable goal or not — especially in an industry built on superficial fantasies — Kaur is determined to keep working at it, both as an actor and as a human.

When I first meet her during our photoshoot, Kaur invites me on a rummage through her camo green backpack. In it, there's a well-worn copy of Julia Cameron's The Complete Artist's Way: Creativity as a Spiritual Practice, bursting with Post-it notes. And then there's Kaur's own notebook — a mix of morning pages (stream-of-consciousness journaling), notes from acting class, and reminders she writes to herself to listen to some Nina Simone and Billie Holiday and to read Tennessee Williams' essay The Catastrophe of Success and Nina's monologue from The Seagull. At the top of a page, she's written "SHAME OF BEING A CLOWN" in all caps, which I forget to ask about and now wonder about whether it's her way of grappling with how her characters are consumed.

"The thing that people love about me is that I'm weird," says Kaur as we chat over Zoom. "A lot of people laugh at me and I still don't know what they're laughing at. I just have weird quirks. I'm not necessarily funny." She isn't resisting the humour — this, too, she sees as an opportunity to improve. "The more truthful I am about myself, the more funny I will be on camera, because I won't be hiding my quirks."

This conversation is happening while Kaur is staying in a friend's guest house in Sherman Oaks. I assume she's there for work. As I tell Kaur, she doesn't strike me as the type to take a trip to LA for sun and fun — she's got a Williamsburg vibe instead. There's a whole strawberry in her mouth that she doesn't even remove while rushing to confirm, "I don't go to LA for fun." I can make out the words even if the consonants never make it past the strawberry.

Kaur's there shadowing someone as research for an upcoming role that she can't tell me anything about. She's also taking part in the Teen Vogue Summit, a series of conversations directed toward college kids. She was featured on a panel on Title IX, sponsored by the National Women's Law Center, called Know Your Rights: Ending Sex Discrimination At School.

"I spoke more about sexual exploitation," she explains, "and how I've been part of it in the entertainment industry; how I was raised with a lot of societal beliefs, which put me in a place where I thought it was okay to be exploited. I had consciously wired myself to make things be permissible."

Kaur is referring to instances and situations we don't often think about in these conversations, like the pressure to apply makeup or adjust the lighting during a shoot to contour her face for a more Eurocentric look. She's describing the erasure, objectification and vulnerability that comes with packaging her appearance to meet industry standards. And she's also speaking about personal experiences with directors, like being shouted at, or receiving flirtatious texts late at night, or being invited up to a hotel room.

"Nothing happened," she says about the latter situation, "but something in my wiring didn't say no, even though I was intelligent. There are these types of wirings I've had to look at — why I've been wired to excuse certain things — and then change that in myself to make it inexcusable. That took a lot of rewiring."

Kaur has been publicly tackling these conversations on sexual violence, exploitation, and empowerment even before Sex Lives. She used to work on Indian public service announcements where she would advocate for female education and more understanding about child marriage, domestic abuse, and the culture of silence around those things. "That was really cultivating who I was as an artist," she says.

When I root around wondering how we got into such heavy subject matter — hanging on to the crude assumption that Kaur is a comic actor whom I expect to talk about fun things — she softly counters that these things shouldn't be considered heavy or dark conversations.

"We think it's heavy because we don't talk about it enough," she says, reminding me that the silence and stigma culturally and violently enforced in South Asian cultures is part of the reason why India's rape rates are so high. "You've got to bring these things that we consider dark in our humanity up to the light, so we can all discuss them."

"My experience as a woman, I have all of these desires to be violent, to be submissive, to be dominant. All of these 'dark things' about humanity, I have all of those. Not that I'm acting on them, but I can feel them come up, and I have to look at them. That's what really effective conversations are. If we can have empathy for the human experience, then we can evoke change."