It takes courage to say no to TV: Surveen Chawla

Petite telly hottie Surveen Chawla who catapulted to small screen stardom with Kahin To Hoga, Kasautii Zindagi Key and Kaajjal some years ago, quit TV when she was at the peak of her success, choosing to do regional films. After a brief and not so memorable stint in southern films, Surveen’s now playing the lead in the Punjabi flick Saadi Love Story and is also making her big Bollywood debut this year.While she was “academically inclined”, slamming on some greasepaint for “creative satisfaction” made Surveen turn to “daily soaps” and eventually to showbiz.
Predictably, the monotonous routine of doing a daily show got to her soon enough and she “decided to take a long break from TV. While television made me a household name, it was time for me to move on to bigger things. So I took a break from TV and moved to doing movies. It was a tough decision because TV stars get fat pay cheques. There was a time when I was getting paid `40,000 per day. To give it all up for an uncertain future was scary.”
Like most television stars who’ve taken the ‘big’ leap to movies, Surveen admits that in India, TV stars find it tough to get a toehold in Bollywood films. She says, “I didn’t do TV for two and a half years, so that the audience didn’t equate me to any of the characters I played in the shows and could see me as Surveen. In the US, TV stars like George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston have made it big in movies too and have emerged as hugely successful stars in their own right. In India the boundary line between films and TV is slowly blurring as TV actors are getting good roles in films which is heartening for our fraternity.”
Surveen who shook a legwith cricketer Sreesanth in Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena was also linked with him. She clears the air, “Sreesanth and I are still good friends and will remain so. I was once even linked with Rannvijay Singh when we were doing a film together. But these rumours don’t bother me anymore. I have been single for sometime now, and when I date someone, I’ll announce it to the world.”
Surveen who’s set to make her Bollywood debut in Anurag Kashyap’s Ugly, says, “It was my dream to work with Anurag, who has taken Bollywood films to an international level. He is an actor’s director and that is why all actors love him.” Surveen, who’s also playing the lead in Vikram Bhatt’s Hate Story-2. So how come a girl from a conservative family is doing an erotic thriller? “My family has never interfered in my professional life. As for Hate Story 2, it’s a movie in the same franchise and not an erotic thriller. That is why I decided to take it up to prove to myself that I could take myself to another level as an actress.”