A lot has been said and written about the practise of casting couch in the Hindi film industry. The debate about its prevalence has been going on since quite a long time. The recent episode of #SriLeaks in which South actress Sri Reddy made shocking allegations of sexual harassment against a top producer's son once again sparked off the debate of casting couch. Saroj Khan's recent comments on the same, gave further fuel to the fire and a number of B-Town celebs have come forward to voice their opinion on the matter. The latest to add her two cents in the ongoing debate about casting couch is Dev D actress Mahie Gill, who revealed that she's had to experience it quite a few times when she was new to the industry.
While talking to the Hindustan Times, Mahie Gill shared how some directors tried to take advantage of her when she has struggling to get her breakthrough. She told the daily, "It happened with me a few times. I don’t even remember the name of the directors. I had to meet a director, so I wore a (salwar) suit, and he told me, ‘If you wear a suit and come, nobody is going to cast you in a film.’ Then, I met another director, and he said, ‘I want to see how you look in a nightie.’ There are idiots all around.”
The actress added that since she was new to the industry, she didn't know who was right and who was wrong. She added, "And when people know that you are new to the industry and struggling, you tend to listen to them. I mean, I actually started thinking, ‘Achha, aisa hota hai ki suit pehnne se role nahi milte aur koi kaam nahi dega.’ It’s very difficult to meet the right kind of people.”
Mahie further shared that later on she started using some tactics to avoid casting couch. She told the daily that she would either run away whenever somebody tried to give her some dumb logic or to guide her in any way. "After all this, you don’t know who to meet, how to meet them. There was a point when I stopped meeting people in their offices and I even used to take a friend along with me so that people didn’t try to act smart," she said.
