Swara Bhasker on 'Boycott Bollywood' trend: Industry was painted as a dark place after Sushant Singh Rajput’s death

Swara Bhasker recently joined the list of celebrities who have opened up about the recent ‘Boycott Bollywood’ trend that is plaguing the industry of late. The actress laid out some of the reasons she thought the trend came up, and why the industry seems to be going through a slump at the box office.

In conversation with India Today, Swara said that she found the way people tried to bring Bollywood down ‘petty and disgusting’. In their blind hatred, Swara felt that people forgot that the industry provides a livelihood for a lot of people.

Acknowledging that the industry is going through a ‘slump’ when it comes to box office earnings, the actress spoke of some of the reasons for the same. Quoting Anurag Kashyap, Swara said that the director’s reasoning of the country going through an economic slump made perfect sense to her, and that Bollywood was not to blame. She also cited COVID and the advent of OTT content as some other reasons as to why people stopped coming to theatres to watch films lately.

The actress also said that people’s perception of Bollywood had changed after Sushant Singh Rajput’s death as well. “After the unfortunate and tragic suicide of Sushant, Bollywood has been painted as a really dark place, that is only about drugs and alcohol and sex”, she said.

Swara spoke of how a lot of people were trying to discredit Bollywood, and there were people who just did not like the industry. With the country’s rich history of cinema and theatres, Swara is hopeful that the ‘transformation’ society is going through at the moment will lead to something good. The actress appealed to people to look at the ‘bigger picture’ when it came to films like Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha, which had a lot of people working behind it to bring it to screens.