Sonali Bendre’s latest release, The Broken News 2, is streaming on Zee5.
Sonali Bendre said producers used to intentionally sell off link-up rumours to the newsmakers to increase the buzz surrounding their films.
Two years after making her digital debut with The Broken News, Sonali Bendre is returning to reprise her character as Amina, a credible journalist who believes and champions ethical journalism, in the second season of the show. The Zee5 series tackles the conflict between ethical and sensational news and its second season explores the consequences of how truth often gets sensationalised to grab eyeballs.
Sonali, who began her acting journey with Aag in 1994, has also often been a victim of yellow journalism and tabloid culture. In an exclusive chat with News18 Showsha, she shares she has often been linked up with her male contemporaries back in the day and opens up on how that ended up making headlines.
She tells us, “Gossips and newsmakers jumping to conclusions – be it about who you’re seeing or the affairs you’re having or even the fights you’re having with your co-stars – come under the gamut of ‘where did that come from?’ And most of the time, such things that were written about me weren’t true at all.”
While she believes that it’s a trend that is prevalent even today, in the nineties, producers used to intentionally sell off such rumours to the newsmakers to increase the buzz surrounding their films. “These days, actors are at least asked if they would want link-up rumours with their co-stars to be floated around. During my time, we weren’t even asked and those gossips would just be out there to promote the film and the actors had no choice.”
The ‘Hum Saath Saath Hain’ actor further adds, “There was a motive to link the lead pair up just to be in news. Itne shiddat ke saath yeh karte the ki I think they (such gimmicks) may have worked. But I found these things to be really strange.” For the unversed, Sonali was linked with Suniel Shetty in the ’90s.
Sonali agrees that ‘perception building is important’ in show business but she was told to manufacture a narrative about coming from a financially strong background to fit into the prototype of a film actor. “To what extent is one comfortable about building a perception is the question. Today, curating a rags to riches story for an actor is working. At my time, they told me to not give out the fact that I came from a middle-class family,” she reveals.
Though she was against lying about herself, her peers often had to succumb to these exercises. “We were supposed to say that we come from a rich background. But I’ve always maintained since the very beginning that I belong to a middle-class family because I thought it was obvious. I wasn’t comfortable lying but I know that a lot of colleagues did do that. But what happens is that when you give out fake stories, you get caught up in them. And the moment there’s a lie, people go about finding the truth,” Sonali says.
