Shalini Pandey recently had a very candid conversation where she revealed how once she had a South director barge into her vanity van, while she was changing.
Recalling how she was very new to the industry and did not come from a film background, she has learnt a lot of things with the passing years.
She told Filmygyan, “Very early in my career, I was doing a South film, and the director walked into my van. He didn’t knock, and I was changing. He just opened the door and entered. This is a girl who has just done her first film. People usually tell you to be very sweet and not rub people up the wrong way. They’re like, ‘Otherwise, you won’t get films.’ I had been told all that. As soon as he entered, I wasn’t even thinking, it was just a reaction, I yelled. I lost my shit. I was 22.”
She added, “Once he left, people told me that ‘I shouldn’t have yelled.’ But, there has to be manners. Just because I am new, you cannot just enter without knocking. You cannot do that to me. And I realised that was something that I carried with me. I would come across as an angry person to people. But I had to do certain things to protect myself. Later on, I realised how to manipulate such things rather than just snap at people.”
Shalini confessed that having been exposed to working with extremely horrid and chauvinistic men in her career, early on, she learnt how to set boundaries.
Shalini shot to fame with her debut in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Arjun Reddy with Vijay Deverakonda in 2017. Her last project was the critically acclaimed Dabba Cartel, where she was seen alongside Shabana Azmi, Anjali Anand, Jyothika, Nimisha Sajayan, and Sai Tamhankar.
