Tisca Chopra Opens Up on Being Replaced By 'Someone Younger': 'It's Very Sad World We're Living...'

Tisca Chopra has earned critical acclaim for her performances in projects like Taare Zameen Par, Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji, Hostages and Dahan. However, the actress decided to turn producer after she was replaced by “someone younger” from a project.

“In 2016, there was a particular director who strung me along for a bit of time. We started doing prep, costumes, lines, and everything. About four days before the shoot, he said they were going with someone younger. Then, he tried to fob it off by saying it’s the call of the producers. But I could see that it was just… I didn’t want to hear that anymore,” she recalled during a chat with Galatta Plus.

Tisca continued, “By that time, I also got a sense of the fact that there were things going on in my head that I had been ignoring for some time. I’ve had the benefit of working with wonderful directors and learning from them by watching their process and imbibing that. If youth and beauty are the only two things that are attractive in a particular market… my insides rebelled against that. If they are interested only in young and beautiful, it’s a very sad world we’re living in.”

During the interview, Tisca Chopra also opened up about how she decided to become a creator and backed the short film Chutney. “I had been doing this piece called Chutney at Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. It was based on Bhisham Sahni’s story. It too had morphed into something else by that time in my head. So, I narrated that to a few, very close people and we came up with the story and wrote it. The protagonist was neither good-looking nor young. Nor did she have any other privileges. She was not well-spoken and didn’t have a male heir or a child. And yet, she controls the narrative in that story,” she said.

Venturing into filmmaking herself, Tisca recently praised the invaluable lessons she learned from Aamir Khan while working with him on Taare Zameen Par. “Working with him was akin to attending the Aamir Khan School of Filmmaking. He threw himself into the directorial role with such dedication, inviting us to engage deeply with the filmmaking process, from scene blocking to lens selection. His passion and authenticity deeply impressed me,” she told Siddharth Kanan earlier this year.