‘You can be the best but you can’t please everyone’

Sonal Chouhan’s career consists of fewer films, but it is because she didn’t go all out in saying yes to every thing which came her way. And she has one ‘complaint’ for it.

“I want to do different roles and don’t like to stick to one. What tends to happen, and it’s a bit of a complaint I have — once you do a kind of role and that works, then people cast you in very similar roles, and that’s annoying for me,” says the actor, who has been a part of films such as Paltan and Jack and Dil (both 2018), and was recently seen in the Telugu film F3.

She cites an example of a time when people had an opinion about her body type, and says, “When I did Jannat (2008), I was quite young. I used to be told ‘Oh, you have a girlnext-door look, you should be a little hot’, so I said okay. Then I did a film called 3G: A Killer Connection (2013), and I worked hard on my body. Then those people said, ‘You are too hot!’ You can be the best but you can’t please everyone. Someone somewhere will say, ‘You should change’. You should never listen to them.”

In the quest for a hit film, sometimes actors end up making choices that they regret later. Has it happened to her too? She says, “I am actually choosy about the films that I do, but sometimes, the pressure does get the better of you. But at times, it’s also good to just keep working. Hits and flops, doesn’t matter, it’s important to be seen. There are two sides to the coin. Regret is a harsh word. But I do wish things had turned out differently.”

Someone somewhere will say, ‘You should change’. You should never listen to them.

Actor