Actor Shanthipriya recently opened up about how Bollywood star Akshay Kumar spoke disparagingly about her skin colour. Speaking in a YouTube interview with host Siddarth Kannan, Shanthipriya recalled the incident that occurred while filming with Akshay for Ikke Pe Ikka (1994). “I think he threw the remark without thinking much about it. He must have thought that it was just for fun and not realised that it was a sensitive topic. ‘Look how dark her knees are’, he pointed out in front of everybody. Initially, he did not talk about my knees specifically. He asked if I had fallen down. I said no. Then he said, but ‘why are your knees so black, is it a blood clot? I went into a shell after that.”
She recalls the day on set when Akshay made the remark and says that initially, the people around them laughed before they realised she was upset. Shanthipriya further adds in the interview that Akshay has never apologised for the comment, but has told her that he was ‘only joking around’. When the interviewer asks how she’d reacted to the reasoning Akshay gave, she says, “I let it go. At that time we didn’t really raise our voices much. We were careful not to let things turn into a big issue because it would reach the producers or could stop the shooting. Coming from down south, I thought no need to make a scene.”
Shanthipriya also adds in the interview that at the time she was only 23 years old. “I went into depression… my mother was a strong pillar of support at the time. We already face such things in the industry both in the South and in Hindi. My sister too has faced this a lot.” Shanthipriya is the sister of the well-known actor Banupriya. “There were a couple of Hindi magazines that even wrote about my sister’s pimples. They wrote that the amount she charged for a movie was calculated based on the number of pimples she had. That kind of journalism was there in the 90s, so me and my sister went through a lot. Even now, my sons go through it, particularly my elder son...” she further says.
It’s to be noted that, as Shanthipriya points out, Ikke Pe Ikka was her last film and the incident with Akshay Kumar happened on the second last day of the shooting.