Regina Cassandra says she’s stereotyped for being an actress: ‘When it comes to dating in South, mothers of guys have said ‘but she’s an actor’

“It is a personal anecdote, but even when it comes to dating people, at least in the South, I have had the guys’ mothers actually say, ‘Oh but she is an actress.’ I am just like, ‘Okay then!’ Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

“The line is so heavily loaded, you don’t even want to think about it, you don’t even wonder how to navigate around it, you are just so fed up with it. I hope that someday we break that stereotypical thought of, ‘Oh but she is an actress.’ It’s happening also,” she said.

The actor is currently gearing up for the ZEE5 series Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke. In the series, Regina Cassandra plays the role of a fearless IPS officer, Kavya Iyer, on a mission to catch the culprits responsible for bombings in the city.

Though she plays an iron-willed character on the show, Regina says being discriminated on the basis of her gender is sadly an everyday affair. Without taking the name, the actor hinted at her action comedy Saakini Daakini, and said how the film led by two women, her and Nivetha Thomas, was mounted and had a theatrical release last year against the bias of women led films.

When asked if she felt discriminated because of her gender in the professional space, the actor said, “Yes, absolutely. It is something you face every day. I faced it recently also. For the first time, don’t know after how long in Indian cinema, there was film with two female leads that was coming out. We wanted to make it a theatrical release, because having two female leads doing action comedy was something that was really refreshing.

“The inception of the film started before the pandemic, so for us it was going to be a normal theatrical release. But things shifted drastically when the pandemic happened. To see that a film like this could have been received way better is something I definitely felt as a woman, not as an actress. All of us were putting our best feminine energy out there to do something like this. It is not very easy to pull off something like that,” she added.

Jaanbaaz Hindustan Ke, which is helmed by Srijit Mukherji, also stars Barun Sobti, Mita Vashisht, and Sumit Vyas. It will be released in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu on ZEE5 on January 26.