Alia Bhatt opens up on pay parity: ‘I’ll never undervalue or overvalue myself’

In her six-year-long career, Alia Bhatt has not only experimented with diverse genres, but also delivered several hits. After recently shouldering a film like Raazi, she has proved that she’s way ahead of her contemporaries. But tell her that and she resents it, saying, “The minute you start believing that you deserve this, then there’s a problem. If you deserve something, you’ll get it. We shouldn’t try and control things.” Alia says she’s ‘not competing’ with anyone else. “I can’t let that affect my choices. I’ll neither undervalue nor overvalue myself because there’s a certain arrogance that comes along with it. Sometimes you do it for the right reasons, sometimes you don’t.”

Pay parity is a huge issue in Hollywood. Back home, the situation is no different. Despite delivering several hits, actresses still aren’t paid as much as their male contemporaries. Sonam K Ahuja had even gone on record to claim that her buddy flick Veere Di Wedding wasn’t issued as huge a budget as Varun Dhawan and John Abraham’s Dishoom. Alia, however, has a different take on the whole issue. She explains, “Investing money in a film is directly co-related to the people you are bringing to the theatre. I’m not delusional that the same number of viewers who go to watch Varun’s movies will come to see my work. He has a wider reach than me. That’s why I can’t expect that the same amount of money, which is invested in his solo-starrers, is invested in mine, too. Also, it’s the subject that makes a film viable. We can’t be categorical about everything because every actor and movie is different.”

Quiz her if she will reduce her fees for a film and she replies, “Never say never, but I won’t let go of a movie that I like because of remuneration. I’ll find a way around it. I’ll still do it because the emotional attachment to my work is way more than the monetary one.”