Sonali Bendre recently revealed that she felt cheated by the way her role in Duplicate was changed, saying it “became a secondary character.”
When Shah Rukh Khan’s Duplicate released, there was a lot of buzz for the actor’s double role. Juhi Chawla and Sonali Bendre were roped in for the lead female roles. The film grossed double its budget, i.e. Rs 10 crore and became one of the highest-grossing films of 1998. However, Sonali recently revealed that she felt cheated by the way her role in Duplicate was changed, saying it “became a secondary character.”
In an interview with Bollywood Bubble, Sonali expressed her disappointment about the role and said, “It was a film that a lot of people talk about. But it’s one of those films that really helped shape my character. The idea was to bring beautiful grey shades to the character, but it turned out to be very one-dimensional. I think it became a secondary character when I took it up.”
Sonali Bendre agreed to play the role only because of her positive experience working with filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt in Zakhm, which released the same year. Although her role in Zakhm was also brief, she was aware of it from the beginning, unlike the duplicate. She said, “When I did Zakhm, I knew it wasn’t the lead character.
I knew Pooja (Bhatt) had to play the role. But it was a beautiful story with Bhatt sahab, and I just wanted to be a part of it, so I did it. But when it came to the duplicate, I should have got an equal role. And at that time, it started to feel like it was no longer the same role. So at that time, I started to feel like I wasn’t getting my due. But I think eventually, everything fell into place, and I got my due.”
Earlier, while speaking to India Today, Sonali Bendre spoke about how her role in Duplicate started to feel like a caricature to her. She said, “At that time I was doing a film called Duplicate in which I was asked to play a grey character in some way. It was very exciting and challenging for me to play that character.
We started preparing for that character in the same way and started shooting accordingly, but slowly, as things progressed, I felt I had become a caricature and not really the grey character that I was supposed to play.” Expressing her disappointment over the changes that the film went through during the filming process, Sonal said, “Every time a duplicate song plays and people mention the film, what I remember the most is how much the story can go off track and how you can start with something and end up in another direction.
And, for me, that was a huge learning. As time goes by, you start wondering if I misunderstood something or it was the opposite. But then, as you move forward, sometimes you do something for that money, but apart from that, in my second innings, I don’t want to be confined to any one place, and I want to play characters that break this stereotype.”
