Actor Jason Shah, who played the villainous Cartwright in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s debut streaming series, Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar, spoke about the criticism that his co-star, Sharmin Segal, has been receiving for her perceived poor performance in the show. In an interview, Jason appeared to agree with the popular sentiment, and said that Sharmin’s character had a lot of unexplored potential.
Chatting with Entertainment LIVE, Jason said that Sharmin’s performance was ‘one-tone’, but speculated that this might have been the direction that she received from Bhansali, who happens to be her uncle. Asked about the backlash and his experience working with Sharmin, Jason said with a nervous chuckle, “I thought, personally, there should have been a higher escalation of emotion in different places.”
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He continued, “I remember Sanjay also saying, ‘Stop acting from your head, act from your heart’. But I don’t know, maybe that’s what they wanted from her. Maybe that was the one tone that they were looking for from this character. But that’s the director’s call. She was alright. She was doing her thing. We worked pretty easily together. We never had any difficulty as such.”
Asked if Sharmin was specifically told to give a muted performance, Jason said, “Maybe, that’s what I think. If not, if she wasn’t told to keep it one-tone, I felt that the character had a lot of space and a lot of scope to do a lot of different things. I didn’t feel it was fully explored. But I’m not the director.” Recently, actor Shekhar Suman defended Sharmin’s performance in a backhanded manner. He told ETimes that Sharmin’s character, Alamzeb, was ‘reticent’, and this required a muted performance. The show’s casting director, Shruti Mahajan, also defended Sharmin, and told Hindustan Times, “She underwent the whole process just like other actors. The process for everyone was the same. They had to go through rounds of auditions, and look tests.”
Sharmin claimed on The Great Indian Kapil Show that she prepared for one year and underwent 16 rounds of auditions for the part, despite being Bhansali’s niece. The show was released to mixed response on May 1.
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