Soni Razdan, Shefali Shah, Kirti Kulhari, Masaba Gupta and Rasika Dugal recently sat for Netflix’s Now-Streeming Annual Junket. Peepingmoon.com got an opportunity to have a candid and exclusive chat with the actresses at the roundtable where they spoke about the future of OTT, censorship, the evolving nature of female characters and the myths behind getting typecast.

During the candid chat, Rasika spoke about the difference that OTT has brought to storytelling and how it has benefited both the audience and the makers and actors. She said, “The long form format of web series has room for more in-depth kind of storytelling. What I observed was that although the production cost decreased and lots of smaller production houses mushroomed, the distribution bottleneck remained. I believed that there was audience ready to watch different stuff but they were just not getting it as a film was called ‘small’ as people did not market or distribute it and OTT broke that. People realized that audience is ready for diverse and different content so now both are working in tandem.”

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Kirti also spoke about the fact that the audience are more aware and critical of the kind of content they want to consume now thanks to streaming platforms. She said that due to this variety audience has become more demanding which is a great thing for the industry. Kirti said, “In a Bollywood film you give a lot of leeway, we are very well-adjusted to mediocrity and that chalega attitude. But with OTT you have the choice of a pause button and go to some other content. That’s when you come to know that you require good performances from actors and now we have a barrage of actors who are coming up with good performances because of OTT. You can’t fool the audience on digital, you might attract the audience with a popular name but after one episode people come to know. People who deserve are finally getting their due, you can’t pretend to be an actor, it’s a reality check now for all the actors.”

On the other hand, Masaba had some great words to speak about the audience’s sensibilities. She said, “OTT has opened up doors for various kinds of people and various kinds of stories and the divide still exists. The person who walks into a theatre and the person who is consuming content on a cell phone are different people and we need to understand that audience is also growing, they have become very unforgiving. They know exactly what they want to watch and they would reject something if they don’t connect to something no matter how big a star and they want to see a chunk of reality on screen. The gap between a star and the audience has become very small and you want to have a sense of touch and feel to your celeb. You want to peep into someone’s home to see how they are or a character.”

(Transcribed By: Vandana Srivastawa)