Chaitannya Choudhry experienced ‘creative suffocation’ after playing similar roles on television

Chaitannya Choudhry worked on television for 15 long years and played all kinds of characters - positive as well as negative.

After working on the small screen for over 15 years, actor Chaitannya Choudhry one day decided to quit television, as he says he got tired of the monotony. He describes the feeling as “creative suffocation” and says all he could think about was reconsidering what to do with his life.

Chaitannya Choudhry made his OTT debut with Hush Hush

“I have a lot of gratitude for TV because it made me who I am, but the kind of work that I was getting was very repetitive to do as an actor. At the start of my career, I did five shows as the positive lead, and another four shows as the antagonist following that. It made me feel suffocated, very tiring, and creatively blocked. It was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore...not this kind of work at least’. So, I decide to quit,” says the actor, who believes that it can happen in any kind of professional space when you keep doing similar kind of work for years.

Choudhry, who recently made his OTT debut with web series Hush Hush, further shares that he had no plans to leave TV or do something else. “I had no thoughts ki abhi mujhe television band kar ke OTT karna hai. All I knew was that I wanted to stop doing similar kinds of work, and I did stop everything just 7-8 months before COVID hit. Having no work affected me mentally. It was stressful in terms of finances as well, but I was sure I couldn’t go on like this. I was just taking my time to decide which path to choose. I am qualified and have done MBA, so there was a thought that I could take up a job as a creative in an MNC. Another option was to return to advertising, where I began my career. So, there were several thoughts like these. The only thing I was certain of was that I couldn’t keep doing what I was doing.”