Actor Sunny Leone has had a tough time in Bollywood trying to shed her ‘babydoll’ persona and get meaty roles from ace filmmakers. However, the tides turned for the actor when her film Kennedy received a seven-minute standing ovation at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. The Anurag Kashyap directorial had a global premiere at the Grand Lumiere Theatre earlier this year. The film revolves around a former police officer who had been presumed dead but is awaiting revenge.
In recent interviews, Sunny has talked about her time in the adult entertainment industry and how challenging it has been for her to be taken seriously as an actor in Bollywood. She also expressed her gratitude to director Anurag Kashyap for having faith in her.
Speaking with Youtuber Ranveer Allahabadia on his channel BeerBiceps, Sunny opened up about the personal qualities contributed to her success. “I think this idea of having business and street smarts really helped me out. For me, I didn’t need the whole brain to figure out how it all functioned. It all had to come down to facts about the company or facts about how things work. I read every single contract and corrected them too so that the companies would get what they wanted and I get what I wanted. So, there was no situation where I was being taken advantage of,” she said.
Sunny also shared that sometimes she had to work twice as hard because she did not want to do certain things that some of her colleagues were doing. She said, “Maybe seeing some other girls’ success and how fast it worked (for them) and I had to work harder because I worked at a very slow pace and I wasn’t into some of the things that were happening around me or that wasn’t the step I wanted to take at that moment. But that has been my entire life. I have always had to work twice or thrice as hard. It gets there, where I want it to, but it just takes time. Even now.”
Sunny also talked about her tough transition to Bollywood in an interview with The Indian Express. She said that she had to fight different groups of people just to get her foot in the door “because everyone says ‘No no no’, trying to be brand ambassador for certain products and someone saying ‘No, you cannot’.”
She added, “Fighting through different stigmas, these nasty articles, it was definitely not easy. I tried to be dignified through the entire process. So when he (Kashyap) called, sorry, I’m emotional about this, I was so happy, because no one had picked up the phone like this before, to give me a chance to prove myself.”
Anurag Kashyap had earlier said in an interview by Live Mint that he chose the 42-year-old actor for Kennedy because he needed “a woman over 40, who is sexualized by men around her, men who are in their 50s and 60s.” He was looking for someone who would “survive and navigate” life despite this challenge. He also said that he had noticed “a certain sadness” in Sunny’s eyes while he was watching her old interviews.