Jason Shah admits he feels ‘a little bit sorry’ for Sharmin Segal amid trolling

Jason Shah, who played the villainous Cartwright in ‘Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar’, said that he feels bad for the trolling his co-star Sharmin Segal has been receiving for her performance in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s debut streaming series, but wonders if it was a deliberate choice to make the character Alamzeb muted in her emotions. While Bhansali’s debut series on ‘Netflix’ has received brickbats for inaccuracy and glorification of courtesans, Sharim’s performance has been widely criticised, with her scenes and dialogue delivery being a constant in meme pages on the internet.

In an interview with ‘Zoom’, Jason was asked what he thought of Segal’s performance, the trolling over which hasn’t stopped since the series debuted on ‘Netflix’ on May 1. The actor said that he wasn’t part of the briefing between her and Bhansali, so he wouldn’t know what exactly transpired, but the relentless trolling makes him feel ‘sorry’ for Segal.

“I think it shows that you can have the greatest director there. But I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what was spoken. From a director to an actor, maybe that was what they were going for. I am not sure. I have heard a lot about this. Honestly, I feel a bit sorry for her. In certain scenes to me, it felt like something needed to happen, but it is a different kind of role. To be honest, to keep that one tone, whether it is me smacking her on the table or Tajdar dying, maybe that’s what they were going for,” he said.

Shah recalled how Segal had revealed that she underwent 16 rounds of auditions for the part and wondered maybe ‘that’s what they were trying to get ultimately’. The actor added, “I definitely felt that the character could have intensified a lot more. There could have been a lot of different ups and downs and the graph could have been very different because you had the opportunity and the scope to do so much. But if that’s what they were going for and accomplished, great. If not, then it is what it is. Ultimately, your viewers are going to be your feedback. People have said, ‘I hate you’ to me because to them I have done a good job. For me that’s mission accomplished coming in as an antagonist, you want them to get that anger towards your character.”