Working in the entertainment industry is taxing and especially when it comes to tv shows and daily soaps. In order to serve content for the fans, the stars along with the team of the show work tirelessly for long hours without any holidays or break.
Actor Shweta Kawaatra has worked in the industry for a good 17 years and has seen it all. She is known for her performance in multiple Ekta Kapoor shows like Kkusum, Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki, and others.
Shweta talks about it in an interview with ETimes TV and shared, “I started my career as a model and moved to television. I worked for 17 years in every genre – whether it was a crime, social, health, comedy, or anchoring a show. And now I feel that there is not much left for me to do. I keep getting offers and feel that the makers are very kind but there is nothing that motivates me to get up and start reporting on the set. I will always be an actor at heart, but in the past few years, I developed an interest in psychology and have been wanting to finish my master’s in it. Thanks to my husband Manav, I could be a lady of leisure and take the liberty to not work and enjoy quality time with family at home. However, even when I was doing many shows at a time, I used to run away and travel to interesting places for weeks. I have always lived my life on my own terms and continue to do so.”
Shweta was last seen in Baal Veer over six years ago. Talking about the reason behind her hiatus, she shared, “I don’t get much time to watch TV because motherhood is a full-time occupation. My daughter keeps me busy. I did watch my husband’s show Shaadi Mubarak because he looked extremely handsome in it. Over the years I have realized that the medium has to evolve a bit. I started playing a vamp in those days and I feel nothing much has changed since then. There is no freshness to it. However, I also feel that TV as a medium should not be changed and made to look like films because the audiences are different. And any medium can’t be like the other. Every medium has its own strength.”
She further adds, “After those 17 years of working in TV, I got burnt out! I used to play saas to a guy two years older than me. Now, I have no FOMO (fear of missing out) left. I feel I need to explore other things in life besides acting. An actor is one part of me but not the entire me. I enjoy reading and doing many other things like traveling and spending time at home studying various things. I have picked up a few acting offers too. I was burned out and wanted to do films, but it wasn’t easy. I was even at the peak of my career, but I had no clue who to approach and how to go about it. And then I lost the mental bandwidth to pursue it because it felt like you needed to be connected with the right people. I realized that filmmakers are not open to TV actors because they are in everyone’s drawing rooms and overexposure kills their chance to be in films. So then I gave up on the whole idea of wanting to do films. But, the web has broken that ice a bit and I did a short film and some interesting projects are also coming up.”