Season 1. Film debut and early work (2009–2018) After making her debut in lead with the 2009 Kannada film Ullasa Utsaha, Gautam made her Bollywood debut in a leading role in Shoojit Sircar's romantic comedy Vicky Donor (2012). Co-starring opposite debutante Ayushmann Khurrana, Annu Kapoor and Dolly Ahluwalia, she portrayed Ashima Roy, a Bengali woman who falls in love with the titular character, a Punjabi lad from the Arora family, and gets to know about his past after marriage. The film, which marked Bollywood actor John Abraham's production debut, received positive reviews from critics and proved to be a major commercial success and one of the highest-grossing films of the year with worldwide grossing of 645 million (US$3.9 million). For her debut performance, Gautam received critical acclaim as well as several awards and nominations, including the Best Female Debut (tied with Ileana D'Cruz for Barfi!) trophy at the Zee Cine Awards, and a nomination under the same category at the 58th Filmfare Awards. After a two-year absence from Bollywood films, Gautam returned in 2014 and appeared in two films, the first of which was Eeshwar Nivas's romantic comedy film Total Siyappa, co-starring Ali Zafar, Anupam Kher, and Kirron Kher, in which she played the love interest of Zafar's character. Gautam's second Bollywood release that year was Prabhu Deva's action thriller Action Jackson, in which Ajay Devgn portrayed a double role, while she and Sonakshi Sinha featured as the love interests of his characters. Both Total Siyappa and Action Jackson underperformed at the box office. In 2015, Gautam appeared alongside Varun Dhawan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui in Sriram Raghavan's action thriller Badlapur. The film, which focuses on the story of a man (Raghu, played by Dhawan) who over the course of 15 years avenges the murder of his wife (Misha, played by her) and son, emerged as a critical and commercial success, collecting 770 million (US$11 million) worldwide, with Gautam's performance receiving praise. In 2016, Gautam played Pulkit Samrat's love interest in two romances–Divya Khosla Kumar's Sanam Re and Vivek Agnihotri's Junooniyat. In the former, she played a high-school girl who falls in love with Samrat's character, and in the latter, she portrayed a Punjabi girl who falls in love with an army officer. Both Sanam Re and Junooniyat were critical and commercial failures. The following year, Gautam collaborated with Hrithik Roshan on Sanjay Gupta's revengeful romantic thriller Kaabil (2017), which tells