Suchitra Krishnamoorthi opens up about her casting couch experience: ‘I was on the verge of tears’

Suchitra Krishnamoorthi said a famous filmmaker asked her to spend the night with him in a hotel room and she ran away.

New Delhi | Updated: July 12, 2023 08:52 PM IST

3 min read

Suchitra Krishnamoorthi has opened up about a horrific experience with a famous filmmaker.

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Suchitra Krishnamoorthi, in a recent interview, opened up about her casting couch experience, where she was told by a filmmaker to spend a night with him in a hotel room. Suchitra said that such kinds of things were very common back in the day and this incident left her on the verge of tears, but she ran away in an instant.

In a chat with Siddharth Kannan, Suchitra recalled, “I met this producer-director and he asked me, ‘Who are you close to, mom or dad?’ We were meeting in a hotel and in those days, a lot of meetings happened in hotels. It was quite common. I said, ‘I am very close to my father.'” What the producer said next, left the actor shocked. “He said, ‘Very nice, then call your father and tell him that I will you drop you back home tomorrow morning.'”

She added, “I was almost on the verge of tears. I picked up all my stuff and I said I’m just coming and I ran.” Suchitra said it took her a while to process what he was saying. “At first, I didn’t understand what he was saying. It takes you a while to process. Then I was like it’s 4-5 pm right now. What am I going to do with him till tomorrow morning? Then it started striking me what he is probably intending. But this used to happen a lot.”

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Suchitra Krishnamoorthi gained a lot of fame after appearing in the 1994 movie Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa and then appeared in many other Hindi films. After she got married to filmmaker Shekhar Kapur, Suchitra quit films in 1999. She previously told Kannan that her parents were against the alliance but she had made up her mind.

“My parents were against this marriage as Shekhar was my mother’s age at that time and he was divorced and from the film industry. My mother sat at my feet and begged me not to go forward with this marriage. They asked me to have an affair and get it out of my head. But I was sure that this is what I want and it is something that I brought on myself,” she said.

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