Producer Rhea Kapoor, daughter of Anil Kapoor and sister of Sonam Kapoor, recently appeared on Kareena Kapoor Khan’s radio show, What Women Want. During the show, Rhea talked about how it is like to be a woman in the ‘male-dominated’ film industry and stated, “Women are very good at taking responsibility, but I think that the way people react to women in positions of authority is a challenge. It’s a lot more challenging for a woman to take a producer’s mantle and say, ‘You know what? I am taking responsibility for this and you all are going to take me seriously.’ You need to prove yourself over and over and over again. It’s a male-dominated industry."
Acknowledging that she is “very aware” of the privilege that comes with being actor Anil Kapoor’s daughter, she mentioned that it was the “only reason” she could become a producer at the age of 21. “When I started to work, I was faced with a lot of patronising attitudes like, ‘She is just here playing film-film. She is not really serious about it.’ Or that I was stupid or I didn’t know what I was talking about. And if I face that as Anil Kapoor’s daughter, I can’t imagine what other women go through. You feel very demotivated because making a film is anyway a mammoth task,” she added.
Mentioning that she faced a lot of sexism in the boardroom, Rhea compared her journey to male industry insiders who became producers and quipped, “I think that if I was a big actor’s son or a big producer’s son like Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar, who of course have achieved a lot, but they were all beginning at one point. I don’t want to minimise what they went through but I get a sense that they were taken seriously at face value."
Rhea made her debut as a producer with Rajshree Ojha’s Aisha in 2010 and followed it up with Khoobsurat (2014) and Veere Di Wedding (2018).
(Source: Youtube)
