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Keerthy Suresh’s performance in Mahanati earned her the National Film Award for Best Actress and established her as an actor capable of taking on varied
roles. However, the popularity did not translate into a big stream of film offers. Instead, the actor found herself without work for six months, a phase that brought both financial problems for the star. In a recent interview, Keerthy Suresh opened up about why filmmakers struggled to place her after the biopic, how the break changed her approach to choosing roles and why she does not regret stepping away from work during that phase of her career.
Keerthy Suresh On The Six-Month Break After Mahanati
Keerthy Suresh has revealed that winning the National Film Award for Best Actress for Mahanati did not immediately lead to more work. The actor, who portrayed late Telugu cinema star Savitri in the 2018 biopic, found herself without film offers for six months following the recognition.
Speaking exclusively to News18, Keerthy Suresh said filmmakers were unsure about the kind of roles they could offer her after watching her performance in the film. “I believe that I wasn’t getting film offers because people were confused about where to place me,” she said that, saying that they could no longer view her as they had before Mahanati. She felt they wanted to offer her more roles, and said she took the situation well.
Keerthy Suresh On Career Choices And Her Transformation
The period also encouraged Keerthy to reconsider the kinds of characters she wanted to play. Before Mahanati, she had appeared in commercial films. “Before Mahanati happened, I was doing a lot of commercial films, where I was playing the girl-next-door – somebody who comes, does a little bit and goes off. It’s not like I had done heavy performance-driven roles before Mahanati," she remarked. In an Instagram post in May, the Dorothy and Dasara actor addressed body-shaming and said her physical transformation was the result of hard work, not surgery.
“I also used the time to transform myself and take care of my body. From 2013 to 2018, I only used to shoot, eat, sleep and repeat. There was nothing called workout in my life. I was like, ‘Mera face toh kaam kar raha hai, why do I’ve to worry about my body?’ But that wasn’t the right perspective. I was a little plump and I wanted to get healthy – not because I wanted to look a certain way," she said.
Keerthy will next be seen alongside Radhika Apte in Akka, which is set to premiere on Netflix on October 30.
