Ananya Panday recalls being trolled as ‘flatscreen’ even before entering Bollywood: ‘You start doubting yourself’

Ananya Panday recalled getting trolled even before she made her debut. She would get nasty comments about her appearance, from being called a 'boy' to a 'flatscreen'.

Ananya Panday opened up about facing criticism even before she set foot in the entertainment industry. She said that she would get a lot of nasty comments about being thin, which led to a lot of self-doubt.

Ananya Panday was at the receiving end of trolling even before she made her debut.

The daughter of Chunky Panday and Bhavana Pandey, Ananya was in the limelight long before she made her debut with Student of the Year 2 in 2019. In a new interview, she talked about the first time she began getting trolled and the effect it had on her.

“I don’t remember the exact time but I remember there used to be pictures of me with my parents. At that time, I wasn’t an actor. I would go out with my parents and as I said, I was very thin. People used to say I look like a boy, a flatscreen and all those kinds of things,” she told Bollywood Bubble.

“At that time, it did hurt because those are the times when you are forming your self-confidence and you are learning to love yourself. And then, when you feel like someone else is pulling you down, you start doubting yourself, the way you look and everything. But I feel like now, slowly, I am reaching a point where I am just focussing on accepting myself,” she added.

In 2019, Ananya launched an initiative, So Positive, to tackle cyberbullying. In an earlier interview with Hindustan Times, she opened up about the change in people’s social media behaviour after the launch of her campaign. “I am seeing a lot more positive responses. Now, when I see a negative comment on my page, I always see a positive response to that negativity. That’s the whole point of ‘So Positive’; it’s not to fight negativity with negativity but to give love back to haters,” she said.

On the work front, Ananya will be seen next in Shakun Batra’s domestic noir, alongside Siddhant Chaturvedi and Deepika Padukone. She also has Puri Jagannadh’s pan-Indian film, Liger, opposite Telugu star Vijay Deverakonda.