Bollywood Star Kriti Sanon Confronts A Guy On A Plane Watching Her Pirated Movie

You know that tired gag, where one character will talk smack about another character to someone, and then a look of pure dread takes over their face and they murmur, “He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” It’s a pretty implausible scenario, and yet it’s still weirdly recurrent in pop culture, to the point where anything who deigns to actually use this joke nowadays has to also include a wink and nudge acknowledging how stale it is. But today, the joke is on us, because a situation markedly similar to this one played out aboard a plane in the real damn world. Maybe it’s not a slacking writer’s tool after all.

Notable Bollywood star Kriti Sanon was taking a domestic flight in her native India when she noticed something strange and posted about it via Twitter, in an incident picked up by Mashable and other sources. A man was using his plug-in phone projector to watch a movie by throwing the image against the partition in front of him, which is a pretty huge plane faux pas, but that’s not the strange part. The film that the gentleman happened to be watching was a new picture called Dilwale, starring Sanon. But the actress was far from flattered to see a traveler enjoying one of her films on his own time, because Dilwale is currently running in Indian theaters, indicating that the fellow had gotten his mitts on and then shamelessly screened a pirated copy of the movie.

It gets better: Sanon snuck a photo of the perpetrator and put him on blast via Twitter, shaming him for engaging in a practice that hurts the film industry for all involved. But then she called the man out face-to-face, and not only did he not stop watching the movie, he didn’t even recognize Sanon as she addressed him. Take a look at the tweet below, and marvel at the stainless-steel cojones it must take to attain this lofty level of rudeness.