‘Working with Akshay Kumar-Ajay Devgn has changed me as a person’: Parineeti Chopra

Until she got to share screen space with Ajay Devgn in Golmaal Again in 2017, Parineeti Chopra had only been paired opposite her contemporaries, like Arjun Kapoor in Ishaqzaade (2012) or Ayushmann Khurrana in Meri Pyaari Bindu (2017). But it was when she acted in the Rohit Shetty directorial that she got a chance to work with a much senior actor. Now, she will be seen as the love interest of Akshay Kumar in Kesari. The vivacious actress, who has bounced back after a low phase and recently replaced Shraddha Kapoor in the Saina Nehwal biopic, tells us about teaming up with the two superstars and how failure has given her a better understanding of life...

You worked with Ajay in Golmaal Again and with Akshay in Kesari. Did you find any similarities between them? 

Yes. There seems to be this weird common blood that runs through them (laughs). I think it comes with the frame of mind and discipline they started off with. I began my career in an extremely ruthless, competitive time. For them too, there was competition but it was healthy. And they carry that discipline forward till today. They like to have fun and keep the set lively and at the same time, do really good work. These heroes do some really crazy action and comedy. So, I have learnt so much from Golmaal Again and now Kesari. I feel like I’m changing as a person on the sets because of them. I’m definitely going to adapt and use these traits.

You went through a low phase in between, but got back on your feet. What was your biggest takeaway from that? 

I’m glad that some sort of failure came to me early in my career, so I had time to deal with it. I might be contradicting myself, maybe it becomes easier with time to deal with failure, but I don’t know. My theory is that it came so quickly in my career — I had two back-to-back flops — something I had never seen before, that it quickly put me into shock and then into fighter mode. Today, if I see failure, I’m better equipped to deal with it. My biggest takeaway was a bigger understanding of life and what I wanted from it. This industry is extremely fickle and also because it plays on emotions, it becomes very easy to get emotionally attached to it. So, the learning was about the professional I wanted to be and the kind of work I wanted to do. It all sounds very philosophical. Three years ago, if somebody had said this to me, I would have said, ‘Stop it. This is all badi badi baatein’, but I actually mean them today. 

You had a lot of expectations from your last film Namastey England, but it didn’t work at the box office. Were you able to deal with that better?

Yes, 100 per cent! I was able to understand that instead of just emotionally reacting to it, I asked myself, ‘Ok, why didn’t it work, this is what I need to fix’. The nice part is that I did good enough work to never lose my credibility. Nobody said that she can’t act or let’s not work with her. The work didn’t stop, people’s faith in me and audience’s expectations from me didn’t change. That means I must have done something right in the first couple of years of my career.