Being relevant for three decades, and still raring to go- that’s Shilpa Shetty Kundra for you, who reinvented herself with the film Sukhee this year. A far cry from the glamorous avatar we see her off screen, she played a housemaker out to regain her lost confidence.
That it came in the 30th year of her career made things exciting. “We truly got some genuine love for the film. I felt it should have been a direct to OTT release, but now you have to go via theatrical, that’s how OTT platforms operate now. I felt the timing of it’s release was not great. We make a lot of movies and garner a lot of love, fan following because of the characters. But the kind of appreciation I got with a film like Sukhee, I have not been able to get in all these years of my work. It was a different kind of ownership the fans felt,” gushes the 48-year-old, whose career began with the thriller Baazigar opposite Shah Rukh Khan.
She adds that it’s not like she didn’t do strong female characters before this. “I did Dhadkan too. A lot of girls back in the day would have sacrificed their love for their dad. We live in a country where this was normal 25 years, in today’s time maybe the girls won’t,” says Kundra.
{{/usCountry}}She adds that it’s not like she didn’t do strong female characters before this. “I did Dhadkan too. A lot of girls back in the day would have sacrificed their love for their dad. We live in a country where this was normal 25 years, in today’s time maybe the girls won’t,” says Kundra.
{{/usCountry}}Ask her to pick the high and low points of her three decade long career, and she laughs, “It’s hard for me to pick any one. I started off with a very small role in a platinum jubilee hit, then evolved to being a mainstream heroine with Dhadkan, then reached the pinnacle of popularity with songs like Churake Dil Mera and UP Bihar Lootne, you cannot take that away from my success. Then the international fame with winning Big Brother, shifting gears with films like Life... In A Metro! These were all milestones. Then my children changed me as a person. I wouldn’t have been able to play a role like the one in Sukhee if I was not a mother.”
Reinventing at the stage she is in her career can get challenging. But she feels that being a businesswoman, running her restaurant, writing books, apart from acting, have helped her stay connected with people spanning two generations. “People are too smart now,” she quips, “When I came from the 90s, that audience was different because the exposure was much lesser for us with our audience. They were easy to please. Today, we are literally exposed to the point of being trolled. You have to constantly be people pleasers, and at the end of it all, not forget that you are here because of the art and craft. You have to please them as a personality.”