Anshuman Jha to share screen space with Australian actor Sarah Hopkins in Welcome to Agra

(From left) Sarah Hopkins, Anshuman Jha and Ashish Dubey

The new year will bring a new love into actor Anshuman Jha's life, albeit for the screens. Come January, the actor will begin shooting for Welcome to Agra, which is set in 2000 and explores the unusual love story between a cycle-rickshaw driver and a British tourist in Agra. Debutant director Ashish Dubey's film sees Jha as the cycle-rickshaw driver, while Australian-British actor Sarah Hopkins has been roped in as the female lead.

For Jha, Welcome to Agra was an easy yes as he feels that love stories have almost disappeared from Hindi cinema in the recent past. "As an audience, we haven't had a quintessential love story like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [1995] or Jab We Met [2007] in the past decade. This film has a rare story [set] before the times of social media and mobile phones. A rickshaw-wala and a British tourist falling in love is a novel concept. It's a cross-cultural love story," says the actor.

While Jha is currently shooting for Lakadbaggha 2, he will begin prepping for Welcome to Agra in the first week of January 2025. He is looking forward to working with Hopkins, who previously featured in The Proper Etiquette for Being Alone (2019). He says, "Sarah has lived and trained as an actor in Perth. It's a great opportunity to work with an artiste from another land."