Sidharth Malhotra shares the beginning days of his career

Sidharth Malhotra made his big Bollywood debut with Karan Johar’s ‘Student of the Year’ in 2012. However, the journey that led him to the project had several detours and hardships as well. The actor, who is married to Kiara Advani, shared that his first pay cheque was from an ad campaign, which fetched him around Rs 2500 to Rs 3000.

In an onstage conversation at News18’s ‘Rising Bharat Summit’, Sidharth shared that he was encouraged to take up acting by an agency. He shared, “That journey has its own hardships. It wasn’t this easy. I was 20-21 years old when I went for an audition on the recommendation of an agency. They had seen my face on the paper,” he recalled.

When asked how he ended up in a newspaper, the actor said, “I used to do fashion modeling, walks, so my photograph would appear in the paper in designer clothes. I had done an advertisement for a ‘Samsung’ mobile campaign. They wanted a girl and a boy. My first pay cheque was Rs 2500 or Rs 3000. That was the value for our time back then.”

Sidharth went on to narrate how Anubhav Sinha was launching new faces through ‘Adlabs’ film agency and he had started training Sidharth for a project. But as fate would have it, the film never saw the light of the day. Sidharth, who has films like ‘Shershaah’, ‘Brother’ and ‘Kapoor and Sons’ to his credit, shared that actors tend to do something out of the box when they are desperate for work and this led him to apply for the job of an assistant director in films upon realising that it could be a good learning opportunity.

“I went straight to production houses, not as an actor but assistant director. I made that shift. Those three months determined my path today,” he said.