While collating facts and figures on how a sizzler who notched up a zillion hits had lost her fizzle, I stumbled upon some rather nasty stuff on Sunny Leone. Nasty as in unprofessional and a nightmare to work with.
For some reason, I'd always thought Sunny would be this utterly professional actress, considering the "adult" industry she came from is a pretty organised sector of filmmaking in the West. But when I interviewed the producer-director of her latest flop, a film titled Beiimaan Love , the beleaguered man spoke of the grief she gave to those who'd signed her up.
If you want box-office figures, Sunny's biggest success so far has been Ragini MMS 2, that netted a little more than Rs 43 crore. Those who got lured to sign her thereafter, have mostly found themselves in the red. Whatever happened to Sunny Leone's famous draw?
"It's all because of Mastizaade ," explained Rajeev Choudhary, producer-director of Beiimaan Love. Sunny was cast in a double role in the sex comedy that was packed with double entendre but was still a dismal failure. The setback made Sunny, aided by husband and manager Daniel Weber, decide to change her image.
"At the producers' cost," fumed Choudhary. Sunny's earlier film One Night Stand (which co-starred Rati Agnihotri's son Tanuj Virwani) had also run into a similar problem. She had suddenly decided to go easy with skin show and refused to do any kissing scenes. It affected One Night Stand and it affected Beiimaan Love .
Surprisingly, both films had an important social message of gender equality at the end of it. One Night Stand wondered why it was okay for a man to have a casual sex while a woman would get branded for it. Beiimaan Love too had a gender issue: if a man could love and leave a girl, so could she. Great messages but this was not Pink . Why would anybody walk into a Sunny Leone film to get a social message from her?
The audience that patronises her cinema wants the Sunny they can fantasise about and not a sanitised Sunny. Like Mumtaz did decades ago, or Katrina Kaif did after a debut like Boom , Sunny too could have graduated into a heroine who'd be taken seriously, if only she had evolved into a good actress. But Sunny never did grow as an actress.
"She doesn't have that in her," pointed out Choudhary, "She arrives and leaves like a star." He wanted to do a workshop with her; she wasn't available. To this day, all her films are dubbed by someone else because Sunny hasn't learnt to speak Hindi. The effort to pull herself out of sleaze and into an A-lister just hasn't been there. And with her curious decision to cover up, to not do sizzling bedroom scenes or even kiss her hero, she has gone completely against the only image that brought in the audience.
The producer of Beiimaan Love cited the example of a bedroom scene Sunny had agreed to do. But he soon got a mail from Daniel saying she wouldn't do a bedroom scene because they were now careful with her image. The manager-husband then went on to tell the director how to shoot an alternate scene in the kitchen!
Meanwhile, the image her name conjured had its downside. For instance, Choudhary had got a shooting schedule in Macau completely sponsored with the casino, free rooms, everything thrown in. But the minute they saw Sunny Leone's name in the cast, the sponsors backed off. So while on the one hand a filmmaker had to bear the consequences of her unshakeable image, on the other he had to sell a new and sanskari Sunny. Tight spot to be in.
So is this the end of the brief Sunny Leone story? One is loath to make this comparison but the desire to cover up and go sanskari has hit a few other glamour girls too in the past. Watching her as the kickass officer of Quantico or as the badass bombshell of Baywatch , one wouldn't think that Priyanka Chopra had also at one stage decided to dress like a nun. Priyanka had breezed in with a Miss World crown, flashing cleavage and long legs on screen and in her shoots for magazines. But the day Rakesh Roshan signed her opposite Hrithik for Krrish, something snapped in her. Priyanka decided that she would make it to the A-grade only if she covered up. She turned conservative with such fanatic zeal that any photographer who dared to supply one of her old leggy pictures to a magazine was promptly admonished and threatened with boycott.
Fortunately, Priyanka's sanskari phase didn't last as she soon re-discovered her oomph in films like Dostana. And thank the Lord for that as a sexy body combined with powerhouse performances took Priyanka all the way to Los Angeles.
Unfortunately, Sunny Leone is no Priyanka.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author
