Jimmy Shergill says cutting his hair as a Sikh teenager was wrong, his parents didn’t speak to him for 1.5 years: ‘You call it a mistake, incident, or accident’

Jimmy Shergill made his film debut with Maachis but it was his appearance in Aditya Chopra’s Mohabbatein that made him a household name. Soon after the release of Mohabbatein, Jimmy started to get known for his boy-next-door charm but for him, he wanted to do more than appear in those ‘chocolate boy’ roles. In a recent interview, Jimmy said that he even returned the signing amount of a few producers because he wanted to take up varied projects instead of appearing in similar roles.

Jimmy said that even though people were telling him to capitalise on his charm, he wanted to move on because he could see that the same kind of roles won’t serve him for a long time. “After working a lot for the first two years, I returned the signing amount to a lot of people because I wanted to do something different. Because this chocolate boy thing was a little too much at the time. Everybody would say ‘why? This is amazing’ and I would say ‘no, there is something inside me telling me that this won’t last for more than 2-3 years’. So I knew that I needed to look for… that’s where films like Munna Bhai, Haasil, Yahaan, these films came to me,” he shared with Bollywood Bubble and added, “These gave a different image and never let you get stuck into one particular image.”

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In the same chat, Jimmy, who is a Sikh by birth and was born with the name Jasjit Singh Gill, also opened up about cutting his hair when he was 18 years old, which led to some tension between him and his parents. “You are a kid, you make mistakes, even I made a few mistakes. Someone brought it up and it went on a little too far,” he said as he spoke about that phase of your life.

Jimmy said that there is nothing “more painful” than not speaking with one’s parents and said that his parents “probably forgave” him in a year and a half. “Maybe it was destiny, and it works more than your plans. At that time, I could not even think that I would land in this industry but maybe it was written. You call it a mistake, an incident, or an accident, things happened, and I landed here,” he shared. In an earlier chat with The Times of India, Jimmy had shared that he wore a turban till 18 but after he cut his hair, his family did not speak to him for a year and a half.

Jimmy will next be seen in Neeraj Pandey’s Auron Mein Kahan Dum Tha.