Actress Vidya Balan revealed that when she signed Milan Luthria’s The Dirty Picture, people thought she was ‘mad’ and told her she could not be ‘doing things like these’ as she had a girl-next-door image. However, her parents asked her to follow her intuition.
In an interaction, Vidya said that she had no reservations about doing The Dirty Picture. “The moment I met Milan, he inspired faith in me. So I knew that he has a certain aesthetic sense, I knew it won’t be cheap. Also, Ekta (Kapoor, producer) was involved and she is a woman. I knew her, I started my career with her. So I was safe on those accounts. But there were people who told me that ‘Are you mad? You are a girl next door and you can’t be doing things like these.’”
When Vidya went to her parents for advice, they asked her to go with her gut feeling. “I remember speaking to my parents at that time and I asked them ‘Should I do it?’ My parents, they are obviously not from this industry, so they kept saying ‘No, do what feels right’. I asked myself ‘what feels right’ and the answer was loud and clear: ‘Do the film’. So I went ahead and did it,” she said.
In The Dirty Picture, which was a semi-biographical story of the controversial actor Silk Smitha, Vidya played a small-town girl who comes to Chennai to try her luck in films. Her character, Silk, embraces her sexuality and does not hesitate to use it to get what she wants.
