Zareen Khan says the industry looked down upon her after 'Hate Story 3'

Zareen Khan made her debut opposite Salman Khan in the 2010 period drama ‘Veer’. Early in her career, she was frequently compared to Katrina Kaif due to their similar looks. She later went on to appear in commercially successful films such as ‘Housefull 2’ and ‘Hate Story 3’.

Zareen was also approached for ‘Aksar 2’, a sequel to the 2006 thriller ‘Aksar’, which originally starred Emraan Hashmi, Dino Morea and Udita Goswami. Directed by Anant Mahadevan, the film initially appeared to be a promising project. However, it later became surrounded by controversy, with Zareen claiming that she was not even invited to the premiere of her own film. Zareen recently revisited the issue in greater detail during a conversation with Pooja Bhatt on the ‘Mammoth Media Asia’ podcast. Reflecting on the period after ‘Hate Story 3’, she said that many within the industry judged her harshly for doing bold scenes.

“After I did ‘Hate Story’, a lot of people looked down on me, especially from the industry. They would say, ‘Because she cannot act, she decided to strip.’”

Zareen also described her first interaction with Mahadevan. According to her, the filmmaker initially pitched the project as a stylish noir film and assured her that it wouldn’t revolve around bold scenes like those in ‘Hate Story 3’.

“He narrated the script in very polished English and said, ‘We are not making a ‘Hate Story’. We are making a genre noir’ or something along those lines. I thought, ‘Okay’,” she said. “But once I reached the set, every other scene ended with a kiss or suddenly required me to be in a bra or something similar.”

The actress clarified that she had no inherent objection to performing intimate scenes, but she felt the project had been misrepresented to her from the beginning. “I told him, ‘I don’t have a problem doing such scenes, but you gave me a completely different brief. Now, just because you saw that film work, you want to add these things’. Later, I realised the director was spineless. He would tell one version of the story to the producers and another to me and my costume designer Shahid Aamir.”

According to Zareen, disagreements between the team members intensified as filming progressed. “There was so much animosity. The producers suddenly wanted me to do a bra scene, kiss or something provocative in almost every sequence just because I had done one such film earlier. That’s not fair,” she said.