Divya Dutta gets candid about personal struggles and battles amid nepotism row

Divya Dutta has come forth opening up about her personal struggle in Bollywood wherein she was ostracised by a privileged few. 

While talking to ETimes, Dutta expressed her views on favouritism and groupism and how it shaped her career.

“It used to feel like a huge sense of loss, coming and being rejected or being told on the phone that someone else has been roped in. I've been dropped out of many movies at the last minute so that hurts because you feel sheer helplessness because you know how good you could've been in that role." 

"But what I noticed was that I have a very strong family. My mother used to ask 'Why are you upset?' then I would say, mom, 'I've been thrown out of the film, why? I don't know.' So she says 'Does that stop your life? Life never stops and tomorrow's another day.'

"I have never had an author-backed role, so the roles I took up I gave it the X-factor as I was determination as I wanted to tell the people about me. So rejections come but you take them in your stride and now these past 7-8 years especially, things have changed. I also used to be underrated, deserves more but things changed gradually because people want good actors and there is an audience, who want to see us," she added.

Talking about the industry putting labels on actors and putting them in brackets, Divya adds, “We live in a male-dominated film scenario and the masses will ask 'picture ka hero kaun hai?' firstly, so that is an aspect you can't deny. Saying so, the audience is still changing. In fact, there is an audience, who have stories to be told, they want actors, and therefore a change is coming so everyone is now looking at good roles." 

"Right now I have 7 films and one of them is a lead role so should I start calling myself a heroine for that. No, am an actor. Am doing a negative role in one and a comedy role in another one, so I just call everyone actor. Don't give a category to everything. 

Look at Sanjeev Kumar, he played a father to Jayaji and her hero as well. Those were amazing times. Rakhiji has also played a heroine to Amitji and his mother as well. So she's an actor and suddenly doesn't become a character actor. I don't want to jump to categorise people and we don't want to change that gap. So I have been really very fortunate to have broken this thing," Divya concluded.