You look vampish’ and ‘Thodi voluptuous body chahiye’ are a few things actor Sandhya Mridul had to hear about her body in the early noughties. Earlier this month, she even revealed how a filmmaker had asked her to get breast enhancement surgery for a film. “I said, ‘I am not changing my body for you. Tomorrow you’ll ask me to change my nose! I won’t do it’. Someone even told me, ‘Aapke toh boobs hi nahin hain’. For one film, they said, ‘We love you but we need you to have big breasts for the character’. So, I told them to pad me,” Mridul shares.

The actor admits that for Page 3 (2005) and Ragini MMS 2 (2014), she did get herself padded to look curvier: “For some scenes in Page 3, I wore [breast] pads. I had roles, like in Ragini MMS 2, for which I suggested the character should wear pads.”

Not one to budge from her beliefs about what she wanted from her career, Mridul tells us, “I have tried my best to not work for money. I’ve gone through difficult financial situations, but I have still not caved in.”

After 2007, she says, lack of work led her to “a phase of chaos”. “I could not see myself on the commercial side [of cinema]. I wasn’t able to fit in that heroine mould. But the kind of work I wanted was not happening,” says the 47-year-old, who has done hits like Saathiya (2002), which she had initially declined.

“Yash ji (Chopra, late filmmaker) said only I would do this role and I’d be good at it. He asked me to meet director Shaad Ali. He was so sweet! I ended up doing the film and enjoyed it,” she ends.