Friends first: ‘Actors delivering hits keeps me on my toes’

Parineeti Chopra claims she is in healthy competition with contemporaries

As two leading ladies working in an industry as intense as Bollywood, actors Alia Bhatt and Parineeti Chopra have always been pitted against one another as rivals. While Alia has achieved much praise for her performances in films such as Highway (2012) and Udta Punjab (2014), Parineeti believes that her own filmography is no less glossy as well.

“She did all these films but I did them right at the start of my career. I did Ishaqzaade (2012) and even won a National Award for that. The kind of films Alia has started with…films like Student of the Year (2012) and Kapoor & Sons (2016) are the kind of films I am doing now,” Bollywood.com quoted Parineeti as saying. She also insisted that filmography is just a graph. “Alia started with a glamorous film, I started with a non-glam one,” shared the actor, who will next be seen alongside Ayushmann Khurrana in the upcoming romantic comedy Meri Pyaari Bindu.

One can compare Parineeti with her contemporaries all they want but she would never mind. In fact, the 27-year-old claims that seeing actors like Alia, Deepika Padukone and her cousin Priyanka Chopra doing well makes her want to work even harder and perform better. “Other actors delivering hit films keeps me on my toes. It makes me work harder and do as well as them. There is no negativity at all,” she added.

And so, Parineeti is not one to stay away from making friendships in Bollywood. She cherishes her equation with Alia and even actor Shraddha Kapoor, saying that they are friends first and colleagues later. “I knew Alia before her first film released and Shraddha even before she started acting! Our friendship really helps us. It only means more encouragement for each other and even if there is competition, it is healthy,” she concluded.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 28^th, 2016.

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