“We used to really work like crazy.” Karisma Kapoor spilled the tea on the tiresome shoot schedules and the flak she faced for her looks during her early days in Bollywood.
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00:00It was a struggle. People were like,
00:02Oh, she looks like Randhir Kapoor without a moustache.
00:05She's too fair. She's pale. She has light eyes.
00:08As a young girl of 16, 17, to hear these comments,
00:12it was tough.
00:13There was a time in the 90s where I would do four or five shifts a day.
00:16The day your movie reaches that parda,
00:18you're nobody's daughter, granddaughter, anything.
00:22The audience will decide.
00:30How do you take this love?
00:36The adulation that you don't just have from your family members,
00:39but from everybody around. It's a universal emotion.
00:43Well, honestly, I'm very thankful and grateful.
00:46And I think that's the most important emotion that I feel.
00:50I'm ever grateful and thankful to all of you,
00:53including this generation, for all the love and for maybe,
01:00you know, acknowledging maybe the hard work because we used to really work like crazy.
01:07There was a time in the 90s when I would do four or five shifts a day.
01:11It was a very, very different era, a very different time.
01:15There were times when I was speaking dialogues from other movies on another set
01:19because I was like a zombie.
01:21I think it's been a gradual journey for me.
01:24I was so young. I was like 16, 17 years old, straight from school.
01:29I went to college for two months and then straight on a film set.
01:33So, yes, very protected background, just right there in front of the camera.
01:39So I think in those days, especially we didn't have Instagram
01:43and we didn't have Facebook and we didn't have YouTube.
01:46So we had to really, you know, work hard to reach the masses,
01:51you know, to reach the interiors of India apart from the cities.
01:55It was a struggle when I came, if I may say so, people were like,
02:00oh, she looks like Randhir Kapoor without a moustache.
02:03She's too fair. She's pale. She has light eyes. Will she be able to emote?
02:07So as a young girl of 16, 17, to hear these comments, it was tough.
02:12It was very difficult. But I was like, no, I have to have that focus.
02:18And my parents and my grandfather always told me, it's not going to be a bed of roses.
02:23You'll have to work very hard because the day your movie reaches that parda,
02:27you're nobody's daughter, granddaughter, anything. The audience will decide.
02:33So I had that determination and I was like, I have to do it.
02:37But it was a time of love and passion and movies were made on
02:42that passionate determination and instinct.
02:45So I kind of miss that also sometimes because, of course,
02:49everything's become so streamlined today and so professional.
02:53But that also had a different kind of magic to it.