4 hours Ago By Mansher Dhillon
Geraldine is the kind of quaint, old-fashioned name you just don’t hear anymore, one that you’d associate with European aristocracy. Combine that with the familiar-to-Indians surname Viswanathan, and you have a delicious juxtaposition of the two worlds that actor Geraldine Viswanathan straddles as the child of a Swiss mother and Indian father raised in a small town in Australia. Beyond my fascination with her unusual name, the young star has lingered in my consciousness since I first saw her in Blockers (2018) seven years ago.
I’ve registered her presence in several notable films and TV shows since then, and have derived little bursts of gratification from witnessing her steady ascent in Hollywood. Her upcoming role in Marvel ’s first villains-led film, Thunderbolts*, has placed her on the cusp of mainstream stardom, and if the rumours swirling on Reddit forums are to be trusted, she’s playing much more than just Mel, right-hand woman to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s CIA Director, Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Fans believe Mel could be short for Melissa Gold, also known as Songbird, the superhero with supersonic sound abilities.
Viswanathan logs on to our Zoom call from her hotel room in London, where she’s attending the global premiere of Thunderbolts* . She’s in a bathrobe, drinking tea, feeling like the luckiest girl in the world. “I’ve never been on a press run of this scale before.
It’s insane. I could cry.” Tears of joy, she specifies.
If the 29-year-old’s excitement seems to border on hysteria, it’s only because this is a lifelong dream that almost didn’t come true. After finishing high school in Newcastle, Viswanathan decided to forgo university and move across the world to Los Angeles. She vividly remembers watching her father leave on a bus after settling her in, too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to dwell on the fact that life, as she knew it, was about to change.
“I had to take the bus all over town for dodgy auditions or open mics at random comedy clubs. It’s crazy now that I think about it.” She gave herself five years to make it, but was back home much sooner after she wasn’t able to get the visa she needed to stay.
It was in 2016, when she was juggling university and stand-up comedy in Sydney, that the call from Hollywood came. Blockers , in which she played the precocious daughter of professional wrestler John Cena hell bent on stopping her from losing her virginity on prom night, was her big breakout. She earned a string of credits in the years that followed, the highlights of which include a key supporting role in the 2019 indie Bad Education as the plucky student reporter who brings down Hugh Jackman’s embezzling school principal, a romantic interest opposite Margaret Qualley in Drive-Away Dolls (2024), four seasons of the cult comedy Miracle Workers (2019-2023) opposite Daniel Radcliffe and, most notably, a leading role in the 2020 Netflix film The Broken Hearts Gallery .
Not only was playing the heroine in a New York-based romcom pure wish-fulfilment for her, but shooting with Dacre Montgomery ( Stranger Things ) was also one of the most enjoyable experiences of her life. Thunderbolts*, of course, was a no-brainer. “The film feels very fresh and distinct within the MCU.
They hired the right people to work on it, who have given it this elevated, angsty quality that no other superhero film has ever had.” Mel is no NPC either—she symbolises the shedding of one’s youthful idealism and confronting how hard it is to achieve meaningful change in the world. “She is someone who, by the end of it, has to figure out which side she’s on.
” Perhaps the need to effect meaningful change had always been brewing in Viswanathan. Is that why most of the scripts she has chosen so far explicitly acknowledge her brownness, and in some cases, have even been moulded to accommodate her heritage? In both Blockers and Bad Education , the character was made Indian only after her casting. The actor finds my hypothesis amusing because she grew up not feeling very brown and having a tenuous connection with her roots.
Her Tamil father—and even her grandparents, for that matter—are Australian for all practical purposes, having spent the majority of their lives there. “I didn’t have a very Indian upbringing, so playing Indian or Indian-adjacent characters at work is the closest I can get to that identity”. Moreover, it has allowed her to find community with a variety of other South Asian artists and creators, which serendipitously led to one of her next projects: a biography of the Anglo-Indian actress Merle Oberon written by Mayukh Sen.
Oberon was the first South Asian actress to be nominated for an Academy Award in 1936 and even starred in a landmark adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 1939. What makes her story fascinating—and Viswanathan the perfect candidate to play her—is that Oberon lied about being from Australia (Tasmania, specifically) to pass as white in a notoriously racist Hollywood. Beyond work, Viswanathan is excited to explore London.
Maybe she’ll bump into Dev Patel, whom she’s always fancied doing a romcom with. And when she returns to Sydney, there’s the store she recently opened with her younger sister, Indira, a fashion designer who specialises in swimwear, repurposed vintage clothes and multi-functional pieces with “lots and lots of pockets”. “Indira is the person I call when it all gets too much.
She’s the one who grounds me.” Perhaps, it will get too much at times. After all, Viswanathan is in the midst of a big career moment with many more milestones on the horizon.
She will captivate a wider audience than before. The press tours will get grander. But she’s not worried.
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