For Lisa Mishra, wearing multiple creative hats has always been about growing with every opportunity. She has embraced both acting and music careers, allowing each to shape the other. After consciously stepping away from releasing new music for a while, she has spent the past few years sharpening her skills as an actor, working alongside some of the industry’s biggest names. Now, as she prepares to return to music, she’s focused on creating work that feels honest and true to who she is, rather than following trends or outside expectations.
In a candid conversation with Hindustan Times, Lisa reflects on her journey as an actor, the valuable lessons she’s picked up on film sets, why taking a break from music was a deliberate choice, and what excites her about this new chapter. She also shares why she believes the Indian music industry should move beyond safe formulas and make more room for original voices and fresh ideas.
Learning to find her space on screen
For Lisa, stepping from concert stages into the world of streaming shows has meant learning an entirely new craft. Unlike live music, where spontaneity often takes over, acting requires discipline, technical precision and consistency. Instead of rushing to prove herself, she says she has spent most of her time observing the people around her.
“As an actor, I’m obviously evolving because I’m absorbing everybody else’s skills around me,” she says. “I’m sort of able to see how these experts who’ve been doing this for way longer than I have are on set—what sort of tools they use to help them remember their lines, their positioning, how to be camera-facing, how to be engaging on screen, and how to deliver dialogue.”
Sharing screen space with seasoned actors has also kept her grounded. Rather than feeling she has made it, Lisa believes every role is something she has to keep earning. “I don’t think I said I deserve to be there, but that I have to earn the right to be there. Rather than making a point of saying, ‘Listen, I got here on merit,’ it’s actually the opposite. It’s that somehow I feel I’m lucky to even be here when there’s people who are far more seasoned and perhaps more deserving of this. So I have to prove that I’m worthy of this space because the people opposite me are like Zeenat Aman in The Royals and Ananya in Call Me Bae herself… The finish line isn’t when I stepped on set. That’s just the beginning point.”
She also feels both careers have made her better at the other. Performing live has helped her become more emotionally open on screen, while acting has brought greater structure to her creative process as a musician. “Acting pays back my musical side through diligence,” she explains. “There’s a schedule and routine that actors live by that can help structure me better as a musician. When you are the writer, composer, lyricist, and ideator, you can suffer long writing blocks and artistic lulls—which actors are very good at breaking out of because their job demands it.”
Lisa will soon be back on screen with more projects. Call Me Bae Season 2 has completed filming and is expected to release later this year or early next year. She also reveals that shooting for the next season of The Royals will begin in the coming months, with the series slated to return next year. “Season two we’ve wrapped already for Call Me Bae and that’ll be releasing by the end of the year or beginning of next year. And The Royals, we have yet to start shooting but we’re going to events very soon. We don’t have definite timelines, but it’s within the next few months mostly that we’re looking to shoot. So, I’m anticipating sometime next year for Royals season 2 as well,” she adds.
Choosing authenticity over formulas
While her acting career has gathered momentum, herrelationship with music has quietly transformed. After spending nearly eight years navigating the industry’s expectations, she intentionally decided not to release new music over the past year. The break, she says, helped her reconnect with why she fell in love with creating music in the first place.
“With every decade of my life, I’ve evolved into different understandings of what this means to me,” she says. “In my adolescence, it was discovery—learning the guitar and chords by myself as a self-taught musician. In my late teens and early 20s, it was passion-driven content creation. When I moved to India, it became a career. Now, it’s about going back in time to that discovery and innocence. Anything feels like a job if you do it enough, and somewhere I think I got lost in how to keep it exciting.”
The pause also gave her the chance to question an industry that increasingly prioritises algorithms and predictable trends over genuine creativity. She believes audiences connect with artists who bring something unique instead of repeating what already works.
“I think what the music industry doesn’t understand is that discovery has to happen organically and it can’t be spoon-fed… The industry kind of fails to see that individuality is ultimately what works, not formulas. The more we push artists towards creating something and regurgitating existing brands of work, the less an audience will actually respond to it because they’re not finding anything fresh or exciting,” she adds.
Why taking risks matters
Looking ahead, Lisa hopes to push herself with more demanding acting roles while also returning to music in a way that feels true to her. Although she is fluent in Hindi, she plans to explore a larger body of work in English, believing there is now more space for different sounds in the Indian music landscape.
She also feels the industry has become too focused on measurable success, leaving little room for experimentation. “The irony is that artists have forgotten to take risk altogether… Once we quantify art and talk about it as metrics—like if we do this it will yield this response, it’ll end on this chart, it will get this editorial playlisting—you become so devoid of your authentic voice. It makes bad music. It makes boring music and it makes music that sounds like 7,000 other things that already exist. The simple risk that we have to take is to take the risk at all and just go back to ground zero,” she explains.
For Lisa, another issue is the limited opportunities available to women performers at major music festivals. She believes organisers often assume audiences only want female artists who perform elaborate dance routines and highly choreographed shows, leaving little room for singers whose strength lies simply in their music. “We need to stop treating female artists as a monolith that requires dance routines and massive theatrics,” Lisa asserts, calling for the industry to make room for the raw, unvarnished rock stars and R&B singers who don’t rely on background dancers to command a stage.
She believes meaningful change will only happen when organisers are willing to trust homegrown talent with prime performance slots and audiences actively support them. “Give homegrown female talent the 7:00 p.m. slot, give them the promotion, test out the possibility, and just watch,” she concludes. “Give it a shot and it will work.”