Drawing A Comparison With Her Contemporaries, Alia Bhatt Makes A Legit Point On Pay Disparity In Bollywood

In less than a decade of being in the film industry, Alia Bhatt has proved that her versatility and conviction as an actor is unquestionable. From SOTY to Raazi, Alia Bhatt’s journey has been a roller-coaster, and she has only proved her mettle with every release.

With an enviable success rate, Alia Bhatt is way ahead of her contemporaries. In a recent interview with DNA, Alia Bhatt opened up about her career and she said,

“The minute you start believing that you deserve this, then there’s a problem. If you deserve something, you’ll get it. We shouldn’t try and control things.”

She also said that she doesn’t believe in ‘not competing’ with anyone else. She said,

“I can’t let that affect my choices. I’ll neither undervalue nor overvalue myself because there’s a certain arrogance that comes along with it. Sometimes you do it for the right reasons, sometimes you don’t.”

One of the most consistent debates in Bollywood, that has existed for years now (apart from nepotism of course) is pay disparity. A few months ago, in an interview, Sonam K Ahuja made a conscious claim that her buddy flick Veere Di Wedding wasn’t issued as huge a budget as Varun Dhawan and John Abraham’s Dishoom.
Contrary to Sonam’s opinion, Alia has a very different take on it. She said,

“Investing money in a film is directly co-related to the people you are bringing to the theatre. I’m not delusional that the same number of viewers who go to watch Varun’s movies will come to see my work. He has a wider reach than me. That’s why I can’t expect that the same amount of money, which is invested in his solo-starrers, is invested in mine, too. Also, it’s the subject that makes a film viable. We can’t be categorical about everything because every actor and movie is different.”

When Alia was further asked if she will be okay if a filmmaker asks her to reduce her fees for a film, she said,

“Never say never, but I won’t let go of a movie that I like because of remuneration. I’ll find a way around it. I’ll still do it because the emotional attachment to my work is way more than the monetary one.”

Alia Bhatt currently has series of interesting films lined up that includes four projects. She has filmed opposite Ranveer Singh for Zoya Akhtar's Gully Boy, a musical based on the life of rappers living in Mumbai's ghettos.

Currently, she is juggling between the shoots of Ranbir Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan's fantasy film trilogy, the first of which is named Brahmastra and Abhishek Varman's ensemble period drama Kalank, co-starring Madhuri Dixit, Sonakshi Sinha, Varun Dhawan, Aditya Roy Kapur, and Sanjay Dutt. In addition, Bhatt will also star in Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari’s as-yet-untitled comedy-drama.