Mumbai: Sushmita Sen took up acting as a profession soon after being crowned Miss Universe in 2004.
In a career of almost three decades, Sushmita has featured in some memorable roles on the big screen as well as the OTT platform in recent years.
In a recent interview, Sushmita opened up on her journey as an actor which started with the Mahesh Bhatt-directed 1996 thriller ‘Dastak’.
Talking about the 2004 film ‘Main Hoon Na’, Sushmita said her character Chandni Chopra was “small but powerful enough”.
In an interesting revelation, Sushmita recalled director apologising to her.
“Farah Khan, my director, called and said, ‘Sush, I have seen the final edit and I have to apologise to you. Shah Rukh of course has the role, Zayed and Amrita have a role, but you are barely there’. So I was like, ‘That is okay Farah, we had a deal, you kept through the promise, and I kept through it. It is done, now don’t worry about it’,” Sushmita told Humans of Bombay.
“But inside I was thinking, ‘Oh no, I am barely there!’ The (Main Hoon Na) screening happened at Film City. My phone starts ringing. And I don’t know why Yash ji (Yash Chopra) is calling me, the whole gamut of the industry is calling. So ab darr darr ke (scared) I pick up the phone,” Sushmita continued.
She recalled that the general reaction was, ‘you have done amazing work, could not take my eyes off of you’.
The ‘Aarya’ and ‘Taali’ actor confessed that she didn’t go for the screening because she thought she would feel bad watching the film as Farah had told her she was ‘barely there’.
As it turned out, she was a rave and all ‘Main Hoon Na’ posters across Mumbai were taken down a day after the film’s release, and new ones featuring Sushmita and Shah Rukh were put up.
“From the response I knew something had changed. The role had not changed, the impact had. The role was still as small as it was, but it was powerful enough. The reaction of the audience was so intense that the first posters of Main Hoon Na all over Bombay had Zayed Khan, Amrita Rao and Shah Rukh and Shah Rukh alone. By Saturday, after the film had released, there was Shah Rukh and me on every poster. That is the power of people and audience, and I have huge respect for that… the audiences were like ‘We want her, we want to see her up there with him (Shah Rukh)’. Farah called me and said, ‘all posters were brought down and new ones put up. You better go for a drive today’. And I did,” Sushmita narrated.
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