She’s never been afraid to say what others whisper. But being that actor — the one who speaks first and filters later — comes at a price in Bollywood. In a candid new interview, Taapsee Pannu addressed something the industry rarely admits out loud: that in films built around a male lead, the hero often decides who the heroine is. And sometimes, the answer is simply not her.
Taapsee Pannu on Lost Work: “It Doesn’t Come to You”
In the latest episode of The Right Angle with Sonal Kalra on Hindustan Times, Taapsee Pannu sat down for one of her more unguarded conversations in recent memory. When Kalra — Chief Managing Editor of HT’s Entertainment and Lifestyle vertical — asked Taapsee directly whether her outspoken nature had cost her work, the actor didn’t reach for a rehearsed answer.
“I honestly didn’t get to know about it firsthand. I might have, but it doesn’t come to you,” she said. “Someone is like, ‘No, no, I don’t want to work with her because so and so reason.’ And the thing never reached you itself, so you don’t get to know about it.”
It’s a quietly telling admission — not of defeat, but of how exclusion in Bollywood operates. Quietly. Indirectly. Without a conversation.
When the Hero Decides the Heroine
What Taapsee does hear about, she said, is a specific and well-worn industry reality: the leading man’s veto over his co-star. “In a film that has a hero heroine, most of the times, the hero decides,” she stated plainly. It’s a dynamic that many insiders acknowledge but few will say on record. Taapsee said it on camera.
She used her own casting in Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki as the inverse example — proof that when the director holds enough clout, the equation shifts. “When Raju sir wanted me in the film, I was in the film,” she said, adding that it was “a pretty big shock for a lot of people” given that she doesn’t move in the typical circle associated with Shah Rukh Khan’s films or those of that scale.
That one example carries more weight than it appears to. Hirani is one of the handful of directors in Hindi cinema who qualifies as a “star director” — filmmakers whose own name functions as a commercial guarantee. When someone like him makes a call, it holds.
The ‘Difficult’ Label — and Her Rebuttal
Then came the part of the interview that cuts closest. Taapsee acknowledged she’s heard the whispers: that she’s difficult to work with. Her response to it was methodical rather than defensive.
“I fail to understand that because anyone who opens my filmography can see that the directors who worked with me have repeated me. And that cannot happen with someone who is difficult to work with. Nobody wants trouble again and again in their films.”
It’s a clean argument. Anubhav Sinha, for instance, has cast her across multiple films — Thappad, Haseen Dillruba, and now Assi. That kind of repeat collaboration doesn’t happen by accident. Directors protect their sets.
Taapsee also pointed to something that rarely gets said with this kind of honesty: she’s not socially wired for the informal networking that shapes a lot of Bollywood decisions. “I’m not a very social person. So I can’t go out there to show up how I really am.” The industry rewards visibility off-screen almost as much as performance on it. She’s betting against that.
The Route She’s Chosen
“I let my work do the talking, which is slightly harder route, but I think I’m saner that way.” That line landed like a quiet thesis statement for a decade-long career.
There’s something worth noting here: most actors in her position would’ve softened the edges of this conversation. Taapsee didn’t. She named the system without victimising herself inside it, defended her professional record without sounding bitter, and acknowledged what she doesn’t know without pretending to know it anyway.
Assi, her latest courtroom drama helmed by Anubhav Sinha, opened in theatres on February 20. The film arrives at a moment when Taapsee continues to occupy an interesting space in Hindi cinema — too mainstream to be called indie, too unconventional to be called commercial. On her own terms. Loudly.
