Saiyami Kher Marks 10 Years in Bollywood, Wants Heart Back

A decade in Bollywood has given Saiyami Kher plenty to look back on. The actor, whose recent release is Priyadarshan’s Haiwaan, says the journey has been tougher than it looks from the outside — shaped by everything from unkind comments to quiet self-doubt, and just as often steadied by a filmmaker’s vote of confidence.

It is a significant anniversary. Mirzya, her debut with Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, may not have landed the way she hoped, but the years since have carried her through very different projects and collaborators. That range is part of why she can look back and, rather than linger only on the hard moments, talk about gratitude.

The climb, and the people who kept her going

Kher describes the decade as a mountain hike where the path is hard, but the view from the top makes the whole journey feel worth it. She calls the ten years “extremely difficult” and says there has been “nothing easy about it.” She also points out that newcomers still face brutal conversations about beauty standards, and she was not spared early on.

What kept her going, she says, was the validation that arrived when she doubted herself most. The filmmakers who came through are names she had long admired:

• Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra
• Anurag Kashyap
• Neeraj Panday
• R Balki
• Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari

Those collaborations matter to her because she had wanted to be an actor for a long time, and each one made the difficult stretch feel worthwhile.

The screen she misses

Beyond her own career, Kher is asking a bigger question about the movies themselves. She points to Tabu as an actor who “blows my mind away” because of how real she is, and she wants the industry to celebrate more of that realness. For Kher, the stretch roughly from 2015 to the pandemic was a period when Hindi cinema told strong, honest stories.

Her reference points are telling. She grew up a fan of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s films and names the web series Gullak as the kind of warmth she would like to see more often. Her worry is that big films are being made, but they are not moving audiences.

“I just hope that we bring heart back to cinema,” Kher says — a line that ties her personal decade to a wish for the next one.

Why fans will recognise this itch

Her comments land at a time when scale often dominates the conversation: bigger budgets, bigger openings, bigger franchises. What Kher is asking for is not a rejection of spectacle, but a place beside it for films that make viewers feel something. That is the same itch many audiences have been voicing — they want to be moved, not just impressed.

If the industry takes that as seriously as she does, the next wave of Hindi cinema could make room for both the big-screen event and the smaller, beating heart.

Source: Hindustan Times

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#Bollywood#Celebrity interview#Haiwaan#Indian Cinema#Mirzya#Saiyami Kher