'I felt like I wasn’t contributing anything'

Mumbai: Vidya Balan said that a lot of her earlier films emerged as box office hits, but she wasn’t satisfied by playing the romantic interest opposite the male lead, a situation that changed for her when she was offered ‘Ishqiya’.

Balan made her Hindi film debut with ‘Parineeta’ in 2005 and before ‘Ishqiya’, she played the female lead in films such as ‘Lage Raho Munna Bhai’, ‘Salaam-e-Ishq’, ‘Kismat Konnection’ and ‘Heyy Babyy’.

While there’s great talent in doing what ‘your quintessential Bollywood heroine’ does with conviction, the 44-year-old said that she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I was playing the romantic interest in a lot of my earlier films, but it wasn’t satisfying. I wanted more substance. A lot of my films worked very well commercially, so some people around me said, ‘Do you want to topple the apple cart? You’re getting good work, continue to do it’. I thought, ‘Good work is very subjective’. I felt like I wasn’t contributing anything and felt like I was sleepwalking through those roles and films. At that point, I was offered a film called ‘Ishqiya’, the role of a woman who owns her sexuality, your femme fatale and all of that, but there was a simmering strength in her. When I was offered that, I thought, ‘Oh my god! This is what I thought I was waiting for’,” Balan told reporters.

She was speaking at the release event of a new study on gender dynamics in the Hindi film industry. Titled ‘Lights, Camera and Time for Action: Recasting Gender Equality Compliant Hindi Cinema’, the study was conducted by the School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (SMCS-TISS), Mumbai, through a grant from the US Consulate in Mumbai.

According to the study, the majority of leads and co-leads in box office hits are men, while women play the lead and co-lead characters in women-centric films. Women generally play the role of romantic co-lead or romantic interests in box office hits, it added.

In Abhishek Chaubey’s ‘Ishqiya’, Balan played Krishna, a scheming seductress, a role she said made her feel ‘reborn as an actor’. But there were some people, she recalled, who discouraged her, saying it was not a commercial film.

“And I was like, ‘Whatever it is, I don’t care. I’m doing this film’. I was also told that maybe it’s an art-house film and that’s a distinction I’ve never understood. In some films, I didn’t know who I had played. The characters were not that well-defined. But here, I felt that she was a living, breathing woman with this deep desire for revenge who did not stop at anything. So, I thought, ‘Let’s see what this film does and then see what comes my way and if this is my so-called last film, then so be it’,” she added.