Vidya Balan says she was replaced in a ‘dozen South films’, thought her career was done

Actor Vidya Balan, recalling professional struggles, has said that there was a point when she was replaced in a dozen South films.

Actor Vidya Balan, who will soon be seen in the biopic Shakuntala Devi, has said that she was replaced in about a dozen films in South India, before catching her break in Bollywood. She also said that she used to feel disappointed when people she believed to be friends would say negative things about her.

Vidya Balan will soon be seen in Shakuntala Devi. (ANI)

In an interview to Mid-Day, the actor said that she confides in husband, film producer Siddharth Roy Kapur, when she feels low. “Ups and downs are part of life, they don’t happen only when you’re struggling for your first break, even after becoming an actor, I’ve been through very deep lows. Siddharth, I just talk to him about whatever I’m going through,” she said.

Asked about the struggles she’s had in her career, the actor continued, “Sometimes you don’t even need anyone to tell you something, you just want to share what you’re going through. So I think, various, various ups and downs. Maybe before I got Parineeta, there was a period of about three years when I got replaced in a dozen South films and nothing I did seemed to be working. I thought maybe my dream of becoming an actor will remain an unrealised one. So that was probably a really low ‘low’. The lowest ‘low’!”

She also admitted to feeling dejected when she heard people she considered friends saying negative things about her. “I would get hurt by comments from people who I thought were my friends. You know sometimes they’ll say things to put you down and I never understood that. Then I realised they weren’t my friends, they were people I was working with. That realisation comes from experience and maturity. I’ve enjoyed working with a lot of those people but they are not friends,” she said, noting that she doesn’t take offence as easily now.

In Shakuntala Devi, which releases on Amazon Prime video on July 31, the actor plays a mathematician often described as a ‘human computer’.

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