Raveena Tandon says she wasn’t promoted by heroes, refused to ‘sleep around for roles’

Actor Raveena Tandon has spoken about the male-dominated culture that was prevalent in Bollywood in the 90s, and how she was branded ‘arrogant’ for not kowtowing to ‘male heroes’.

Actor Raveena Tandon has said that because she refused to play by the rules of 90s Bollywood, a lot of people thought that she was arrogant. Raveena, in an interview, has said that at the peak of her career, nasty articles were written about her because she did not adhere to the whims of her male co-stars.

Bollywood actor Raveena Tandon poses for a photograph. (ANI)

She told Pinkvilla in an interview, “I didn’t have godfathers, wasn’t part of camps and didn’t have heroes promoting me. I was not sleeping around with heroes for roles or having affairs. In a lot of cases, I was considered arrogant because I wasn’t pandering to what the heroes wanted me to do - laughing when they wanted me to laugh, sitting when they asked me to sit.”

She said that she was disappointed by female journalists who didn’t stand by her, and were essentially the stooges of popular male actors. Raveena said that mean articles were often written about her because somebody’s ego was bruised. “There used to be these cabals which used to have the heroes, their girlfriends and their journalist chamchas. What used to shock me was that a lot of these female journalists would do something like this to another woman. When they now stand up and say, we’re feminists and writing ulta-feminist columns,” she said, adding that she never lashed out.

She didn’t, however, deny the existence of “camps and mean girl gang” in Bollywood, which she’d tweeted about after Sushant’s death.

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