Shefali Shah On How Doing Older Roles Affected Her Career: ‘There Was No Chance Of People Casting Me As A Lead Or In An Important Role’-EXCLUSIVE
Shefali Shah shares how her decision to do older roles than herself in real life, affected her career going forward
Shefali Shah is one of those actors in Bollywood who are known to make every role they portray their own. She has made some bold career choices in her career like playing characters much older than her in real life. In the 2005 film, Waqt: The Race Against Time, she played wife to a much-older Amitabh Bachchan and a mother to Akshay Kumar, who is older than her in real life. Even in the 2015 film Dil Dhadakne Do, she played mother to Ranveer Singh and Priyanka Chopra Jonas’ characters, who in real life are much closer to her in age.
Ask Shefali if she thinks such decisions have held her back in her career and she replies in the affirmative. “They did hold me back, but they were choices that I made. I wanted to do Waqt. Even before that, when I was 20, I did Hasratein where I was shown as around 35-40 years old. That’s the exciting part of being an actor, you get to explore stuff that you are not. I thought of them as an actor, that they excited me. But it did affect my career as after that, there was no chance of people casting me as a lead or in an important role. It was always a supporting character,” she asserts.
Shefali goes on to lament the condition of actresses in the olden times, which lasted even up until a few years ago. “Unfortunately, in conventional Bollywood films until now, there haven’t been substantial roles for women beyond 25. Until very recently, a woman had a shelf life in Bollywood and an expiry date came really fast which was tragic. They didn’t know what to do with a woman who was 30 or 40, not realising that they were in their prime. Now it’s all changing,” she points out.
Standing by her choices, Shefali insists that all her decisions have been her own. “I didn’t have a problem in doing Dil Dhadakne Do. It was my choice to do it, nobody put a gun to my head. But after that, I made a conscious choice not to do that again. I was offered two amazing films with incredible directors and I loved the scripts. They went out to be big hits but I realised I didn’t want to do it and I will wait. Even if that means not working for a year or two, I was fine with it. I was ready to wait and it worked for me. I could have probably been waiting till I was 103, but fortunately it worked for me earlier,” she quips.
Image Source: Instagram/shefalishahofficial/dddthefilm
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