The year 2022 has been rather hectic for Sargun Mehta, who had back-to-back Punjabi releases as well as the Hindi film Cuttputlli, starring Akshay Kumar. Ask if we’d see more of her in Bollywood this year and the actor says, “It would be even better to ask this question to those making Bollywood films, if they see me working in their films.”

She is quick to add, “As for me, I’m happy where I am. I get to choose the [kind of] work I want to. With Cuttputlli, it was the same. What I had in mind was, even if I have 10 scenes, people will see me the way I want them to see me, that’s what matters. But, whenever I feel there is a lot more for me to do, people might see me in five Bollywood releases. You never know!”

Mehta reveals that when she decided to focus on Punjabi films, the thought in her mind was, “By being the small fish in the big pond (Bollywood), I did not want to be lost. That’s why I decided to find my feet in my home ground.”

The actor, too, faced her share of resentment to the decision. “The first time I said yes to a Punjabi film, there was somebody who was supposed to manage me for south [films] and he said, ‘I am sorry, if you do a Punjabi film, I can’t manage you because they are not so big’. When I joined the industry, there were only four to five films being made in a year. The success rate was also not very high. But in today’s time, we are producing 60 films a year. That’s a huge jump,” says Mehta, who was last seen in the Punjabi outing Babe Bhangra Paunde Ne, which released on the web.