Justice Markandey Katju has a grateful supporter. Adult movie starlet Sunny Leone is thrilled to bits that the former Supreme Court judge came to her defence when she was being panned as a porn actress across India. “There is no saint without a past and no sinner without a future,” Katju had said.

We are meeting her in a suburban Mumbai hotel. She is about to leave for Jaipur for her first feature film — Pooja Bhatt’s Jism 2. Dressed in a stunning black outfit, the actress is candid about her past — and optimistic about her future.

“Yes, I heard that he (Justice Katju) compared me to Mary Magdelene. When a person like him came out in my support, it gave me hope: I know who I am and I am not breaking any rules. My fans and the press have been nice to me. But it was good that someone high up there was saying this. It was really a nice gesture and I thank him for sticking up for me,” she says.

From being Karanjeet Kaur to going hardcore, Sunny Leone has done it all. And now she is ready with her new avatar — that of an actress in Bollywood.

The dust kicked up by her detractors over her past is still to settle down though. When Leone joined the reality show Bigg Boss 5, indignant viewers argued that she had no place on Indian television because she’d acted in porn films.

“I understand that there is a moral FBI everywhere,” she says. “But sex wasn’t born yesterday.”

Certainly not in India, where legislators were recently found watching porn on their cellphones in the Karnataka Assembly. “Everybody watches such material — you cannot escape it. It shows that everyone wants to watch (porn). Maybe sitting in the Assembly wasn’t the greatest idea, but who are we to judge anyone?”

Leone points out that people surf adult material on the Internet all the time. “I have done it; my friends have done it,” she stresses.

She smiles when we tell her that some Bollywood actresses Googled her recently to find out more about her. Clearly, she is enjoying all the attention.

For Leone, it’s been quite a journey. She grew up in what she calls a “Punjabi home” in Canada. “We ate Indian food every day except on Fridays and Saturdays, which were branded as ‘American’ days. It meant that we had Italian or Chinese or Mediterranean but certainly not dal, roti or sabzi.” She moved to California when she was 14 and went on to finish her high school there.

The move from a Punjabi house to Penthouse wasn’t perhaps the easiest thing for her to do. But the adult magazine made Leone, then 21, an offer she couldn’t refuse. “The offer came in 2003 via an agent who told me that I would only need to pose for pictures in exchange for a handsome amount of money. The money was superb. Honestly, getting pictures shot in one’s birthday suit is not the easiest thing to happen to any girl, but then the output in terms of the photographs stunned me. I wondered how I could look so stunning,” says the woman who swept across the centrefold of the magazine.

Leone — the name was apparently given to her by Penthouse owner Bob Guccione — has no qualms admitting that she joined the adult film industry of her own accord. “I knew what I was doing — no one forced me into the business. I run my own company and make my own films and that is reason enough for me to be proud of my work,” she says.

The actress believes she was always made for the glamour industry. “The hair, the make-up, the clothes and my connect with the camera — it was there to see when I did my photo shoots. Entertainers have a connection with the camera and that is how they connect with the people watching them. It is a part of a true entertainer’s DNA.”

Leone says she loves to shoot, and can’t have enough of it. “The pictures of Jism 2 are just amazing. I love my job,” she gushes.

With Bollywood, her life seems to be on a new arc. “I’ve wanted this for the last 11 years of my life — so I hope to make a really, really good movie for everyone. My fans are going crazy,” she smiles. The story, she adds, is compelling. “It doesn’t seem like, I guess, a typical Bollywood movie. The characters are very compelling too.”

Leone was in fact contacted by Pooja Bhatt for Jism, the first film in the series. Leone had then appeared in her first adult film, and Bhatt had contacted her after reading a write-up about it in a magazine.

“Somehow it did not work out because of the Penthouse deal. But if I had signed up, Bipasha would not have been there in Jism — and she was so good in the film. I loved the film, and I loved Bipasha’s performance in it. I guess, things take their own time and that’s good.”

Leone believes that her fans in India have accepted her the way she is. “The turning point was when a couple wanted their kid to pose with me. I got a bit confused when the parents wanted their son to pose with me! But then I realised that it was because of Bigg Boss, because I had signed on a film like Jism 2.”

In India, she adds, people see her not as an adult entertainer but a girl in Bigg Boss who has gone on to become an actress. “People are not judgemental and that’s a defining moment,” she says.

For Sunny, the sun is shining.