Kangana Ranaut, Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone should ask for higher pay: Madhoo

Bollywood has been infamous for not paying its female actors the same as their male counterparts. Kareena Kapoor was in the news when she demanded a whopping sum of Rs 12 crore to play Sita in a film based on Ramayana. It didn’t work out in the end but that’s a totally different story. With an increasing number of films working with female-led stories, makers now experiment and let female actresses take the lead wherever deemed necessary. Taking this change as a cue, Phool Aur Kante actress Madhoo pointed out the need for pay parity in Bollywood.

She said that names like Kangana Ranaut, Deepika Padukone, Anushka Sharma, Katrina Kaif and Priyanka Chopra, are able to drive demand, get audiences to the theatres and that speaks volumes of the changes we have seen in the past decades. In response to this change, Madhoo said that these actresses should ask what they deserve as they are “crowd-pullers”. While Pathaan was Shah Rukh Khan’s film, it was equally Deepika Padukone’s. Katrina Kaif is also coming up with the first-ever female superhero film with Ali Abbas Zafar.

Speaking to TOI, Madhoo said, “Agar film achchi chali toh log bolte the Ajay Devgn ki film hit ho gayi, Akshay Kumar ki film hit ho gayi, aur agar flop hoti thi toh log bolte the Ajay Devgn ki film flop ho gayi, Akshay Kumar ki film flop ho gayi. (If the film is good, they call it an Ajay Devgn film or an Akshay Kumar film while when it fails, the onus again falls on the actor) I never got blamed for anything. My market went on for 10 years and I was busy with good films. Some became hits and people praised the jodi. No one discredited me for any film, and hence I never questioned it. But hats off to the girls who are questioning it today.”

Madhoo continued, “Actresses like Kangana Ranaut, Deepika Padukone and Alia Bhatt are actually pulling crowds to theatres, so they should definitely ask for higher remuneration. If people are coming to see Deepika, she has the right to ask for the money. In my time, people didn’t come to see just Madhoo on screen; they came to see Ajay-Madhoo, Akshay-Madhoo and so on. I never questioned it because that was the truth.”

Recently, Priyanka Chopra spoke about never receiving pay parity in Bollywood. She said that actresses still get paid less than 10 per cent of what the male actor is getting.

WATCH WION LIVE HERE