Sharmin Segal, who has been on the receiving end of incessant trolling for her performance as Alamzeb in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi, recently opened up on the effect it had on her, her mental health and more. In an interview with Pinkvilla, Sharmin was asked if the trolling had an impact on her mental health, she replied, “I’ve been working on my mental health for a very long time in my life now. It is just not throughout my acting life. It is something when you start understanding yourself better, it becomes a lot easier to realize that you live in a very vast world where people with a lot of opinions.”
Speaking about the audience’s reaction to her performance as Alamzeb, Sharmin added, “I’ve chosen this profession to cater to an audience, so I was prepared for reactions and responses and there has been so much love also. Sometimes looking at the negativity, we tend to completely omit the positivity. Maybe the first few days it did. I just felt a little like uneasy, but after that, it’s always a constant dialogue with yourself. You have thoughts, and then you think about those thoughts, judge, and that is what shapes morality and ethics.”
Speaking about how she dealt with the negativity online, Sharmin told Pinkvilla, “So, basically you keep having that inner dialogue with your inner self, and then you pull yourself out even if you are down. But I don’t think it later affected me as much because you’ve to swift through it because there are people who are saying positive things also. And, I can’t negate that only because those people have taken their time out to write good things about me. And, I can’t suddenly fixate on somebody that has taken their time out to write negative things about me.”
Sharmin added that she has been receiving a lot of love in her DMs. “If it’s constructive, then yes I am very open to listening to it. But if it’s not, then you’ve to focus on the amount of love. My DMs are filled with a lot of love. Negativity tends to be spoken about a lot more in public because people want to talk about negative things, but there is a lot of positivity also like I need to embrace that as well,” Pinkvilla quoted Sharmin as saying.
Speaking of Heeramandi, it stars Manisha Koirala, Sonakshi Sinha, Aditi Rao Hydari, Richa Chadha, Sharmin Segal, Sanjeeda Shaikh, Taha Shah Badussha, Adhyayan and Shekhar Suman and Fardeen Khan. Heeramandi showcases the lives of courtesans, set against the backdrop of the Indian freedom struggle. The series is an epic saga of love, power, revenge, and freedom. Meanwhile, the second season of the show was announced recently.
