Filmmaker Sanjay Leela Bhansali denied having cast actor Sharmin Segal in his debut streaming series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar only because she’s his niece. In an interview, the filmmaker said that Sharmin went through several rounds of auditions, and her face perfectly suited the part of Alamzeb, a naive young woman born into the unforgiving world of scheming courtesans and noblemen.
Speaking to India Today, Bhansali defended Sharmin’s casting, but didn’t go into any detail about her performance, which has been panned across the board. “She has a face which is exactly what Alamzeb should be, somebody who doesn’t want to be a tawaif, she doesn’t talk like a tawaif, she doesn’t walk like a tawaif. Her face had innocence, whereas all the others had lived life, they had survived manipulation and mental games. You needed somebody with a fresh, innocent quality to her… I felt that Sharmin was the right choice for Alam not because she’s my niece.”
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He continued, “She had to go through the grind. There were an innumerable number of tests, auditions. There’s no end to the number of tests I’ve done with her, after I’ve decided to cast her. I told her, ‘You have to go through the grind, you have to get it right, because this world you’ve never been to, you’ve never acted in. All these other actors have worked over a period of time, they’ve played characters like this and have understood all these nakhras and thumkas and the nazakat…'”
Bhansali also declared that the star system in India should be ‘demolished’, and expressed satisfaction with the performances that his cast was able to deliver in Heeramandi. He said that even when he has worked with major stars — Bhansali has collaborated with the likes of Aishwarya Rai, Madhuri Dixit, Shah Rukh Khan, Hrithik Roshan, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone and Salman Khan — he views them as actors first. “If you get the casting right, half the battle is won. People say, ‘Don’t you think you need bigger stars?’ I said, ‘No, these are fantastic actors, and I need actors’. I feel we should get rid of the star system.”
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Several of Sharmin’s co-stars have spoken about the criticism that she has received for her performance; Sharmin herself hasn’t participated in any post-release interviews, and has muted comments on Instagram. Recently, actor Jason Shah admitted that the character of Alamzeb had a lot of dramatic potential that he felt wasn’t fully explored by Sharmin, whose performance he described as ‘one-tone’. Before that, actor Shekhar Suman defended Sharmin’s performance in a backhanded manner, and said that it was supposed to be muted. Heeramandi was released to mixed reviews on Netflix on May 1.
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