Divya Dutta recalls being sent back from a set because she had lost too much weight: ‘I would feel very objectified’
She also talked about ‘feeling very objectified’, which made her believe ‘humanity doesn’t exist’ in showbiz. Talking about facing rejections, Divya told Lallantop, “Slowly in the industry, I have learned that you do face rejections, you are thrown out of films too. We often talk about nepotism, but I think there is a certain favoritism that exists in outsiders too. And it is not just in films, but everywhere, because stakes are high here so a lot of times, things look unfair. Even today I feel that I deserved something and why did somebody else get it?”
Divya Dutta says 90s was a ‘confusing’ time in her career, people would say she ‘looks like Manisha Koirala’: ‘Now they ask if I’m Vidya Balan’s sister’
The actor added, “Life trains you to deal with rejections. When I had not signed any film, I would go to every producer’s office asking for work. That was a time when multi-starrers were made, so there would be an opportunity. But I did not realize that I would not fit in that frame of a typical very glamorous heroine. I was a cute girl and a good actor, but only I knew that. One day I felt I had signed 22 films, some of them even gave me a token. Nobody was saying no. Later I got to know that the 22 films I told my mother I was starting, only 2 out of them went on floors and I was not the heroine for those.”
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Divya Dutta also opened up being ‘objectified’ in the initial years of her career. “I was dropped from many movies, in fact, for one of them I had reached the set and was sent back, saying that I had lost a lot of weight. I was very frustrated. I would feel very objectified and I started searching for humanity and realized that it doesn’t exist in this business. I remember telling my mother that if I had done that film with Shah Rukh Khan, I would have been a superstar and she told me that those people would come in life to work with me and that happened.”
On the work front, Divya will be seen next in Chhava, starring Vicky Kaushal and Rashmika Mandanna in the lead roles.