Modern Love: Mumbai: Sarika reveals surviving during COVID-19 pandemic with theatre jobs that paid her around Rs 3,000

Actor Sarika will be next seen in the Amazon Prime Video anthology series, Modern Love: Mumbai. She plays an important role in the episode, My Beautiful Wrinkles with Danesh Razvi and Ahsaas Channa. Sarika plays the role of a 60-year-old woman, Dilbar Sodhi, who has to deal with a young man's romantic interest in her.

The actor will be seen on the screen after about five years. In a recent interaction with News18, she spoke about the long hiatus, which only got extended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She said that she had planned to take a break for a year but it did not work out as per her plan due to the sudden outbreak of the Coronavirus. She revealed that she ran out of money during the lockdown and worked in theatres that paid her less than Rs 3,000.

She said, "I just thought I was wasting life in a way if you look at it. You wake up every morning, (things) don’t happen, you go to sleep. So I just decided to take one year’s break and not do any work." She added that she wanted to do something totally different and so, she started doing theatre. She found it so brilliant that her one-year plan turned into five. She decided to get back to acting because she ran out of money during lockdown, doing theatre. She said, “Lockdown happened and the money ran out, so where do you go? You go back to acting because in theatre you just get like ₹2000-2700 and you can’t do anything so this is why I was not at all there." But she says it was a conscious decision and they were great five years of her life. 

Sarika had earlier taken a break in 1986 she became pregnant with daughter Shruti Haasan with her ex-husband and actor-filmmaker Kamal Haasan. She then got back to screen in the mid-2000s and did films like Bheja Fry and Manorama Six Feet Under. She will now be seen in the short My Beautiful Wrinkles, which is part of six-episode anthology series Modern Love: Mumbai, helmed by filmmaker Alankrita Shrivastava. Her episode is produced by Pritish Nandy Communications and the anthology is gearing up for a release on the OTT platform on May 13.

The series is the Indian adaptation of the popular American web show Modern Love, which is based on The New York Times column of the same name. The Indian adaptations of the show also include Modern Love Chennai (Tamil) and Modern Love Hyderabad (Telugu). 

Meanwhile, Sarika, who was last seen in in Katrina Kaif and Sidharth Malhotra’s Baar Baar Dekho in 2016, also has Sooraj Barjatya's film, Uunchai. She will be seen sharing the screen with Amitabh Bachchan, Neena Gupta, Anupam Kher, and Boman Irani in the film.