Sonali Kulkarni was ‘humiliated’ in first audition: ‘Dark-skinned girls don’t look good’
Sonali Kulkarni recalled about the colorism she experienced at her first audition as a teenager in Pune
Actor Sonali Kulkarni has given a personal account of the colorism she faced at the very beginning of her career, recalling a moment at her first film audition in Pune when a woman looked at her and told her that “dark-skinned girls don’t look good on camera.” The comment, delivered to a teenager who had come to the audition wearing the only good outfit she owned, left a wound that took years to heal.
In a conversation with Bollywood Bubble, Sonali recounted, “When I went for the audition for my first film, the people around there could be pretty harsh sometimes. A lady in Pune asked me, ‘Why have you come? Why are you here?’ And I said, ‘Ma’am, there’s an audition and I was told to come.’ And she told me, ‘No, no, no, I know, but do look in the mirror sometime. Dark-skinned girls don’t look good on camera.’”
She added, “I was young. I was kind of insecure about it. We didn’t have much money in my family. All we had was love,” she said. “For me, it was so humiliating that I felt like running away. I wanted the earth to just take me in like Goddess Sita cradling me in her lap. I wanted to disappear from there. She was so mean.”
Sonali said the comment landed on top of insecurities she was already carrying as a teenager growing up in a household where she measured herself against her brothers. “My nose is small. I’m wheatish, not fair,” she said. “My eldest brother is very handsome. The middle brother is fair and handsome. And I always thought, you know, I’m kind of a person with a personality that’s really vague. Like, what is this? That’s how it felt.”
It was not the cruelty of the comment, Sonali realised. It was what happened afterwards. She did not leave the audition. She spent the time after the humiliation not processing her own pain but managing the situation so that the woman who had insulted her would not feel uncomfortable.
“I had to keep myself alive just to console her,” Sonali Kulkarni said. “All these years, I couldn’t even openly tell anyone that this woman talked to me like that. I had to work on myself. I had to believe that it’s okay, we’re all born beautiful, literally.”
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