Sandhya Mridul confesses wearing breast pads for Page 3 and Ragini MMS 2; reveals she declined Saathiya initially – Exclusive

‘You look vampish’, ‘Yaar aapki body nahi hai’, ‘Thoda voluptuous chahiye hota hai’, ‘Aap ye laga lo’, are just a few things actor Sandhya Mridul had to hear in the early noughties about her body. Earlier this month, Mridul even put up a post revealing how a filmmaker asked her to get a boob job done for a film. “I was like I am not changing my body for you. Tomorrow you will come and say change your nose. I won’t do it. Someone told me ‘Aapke toh boobs hi nahi hai, sorry’. Mujhe bola gaya hai! For one film, they said, ‘We love you but we need you to have big boobs for the character’. I told them to go ahead and pad me,” Mridual shares.

Furthermore, Mridul nonchalantly admits that for Page 3 (2005) and Ragini MMS 2 (2014) she did pad herself up: “For Page 3 I wore (breast) pads. For some scenes I did it. Here, I said it. There are characters like in Ragini MMS where I only suggested she should wear pads because that is the character. But you cannot tell me to get a boob job. For Ragini MMS it completely made sense to me.”

‘Aap bahar chalne ko tyaar nahi ho’, ‘chalo beer pila do’, are other phrases Mridul had to hear. “Ye sab suna hai. That was another reason why I didn’t do enough work,” she states. Not one to budge from her beliefs about what she wanted from her career, Mridul tells us, “I have tried my best to not work for money. I have gone through phases where I have been extremely in difficult financial situations but I have still not caved in.”

Post-2007, Mridul confesses lack of work offers led her to “a phase of chaos”. “That phase was really hard. I did not see myself on the commercial side, at the same time, the kind of work I wanted was not happening. Actors today are far more fortunate. It was extremely frustrating and confusing. I wasn’t able to fit myself in that Heroine mould,” says the 47-year-old, who has been a part of some popular commercial films like Saathiya (2002), which she initially did decline. “Yash ji (Chopra, late filmmaker) ne mujhe jab Saathiya ke liye bola tha na, mene kar diya tha. I said no. Yash said only you would do this role and you will be good at it. But I told him , I cannot do this, I don’t want to do films. He said, ‘Go and meet Shaad Ali for me’. He was so sweet. Then I did it, and I enjoyed it,” Mridul elaborates.

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