I wanted my own identity: Shruti Haasan

Actor Shruti Haasan followed in her father Kamal Haasan’s footsteps and became an actor in 2009 with the Hindi film Luck. But talking to Madan Gowri, she admitted there was a time when she wanted nothing more than to carve out her own identity. So much so that she would even pretend to be someone else.

Shruti said in the interview that while she’s ‘very proud’ of being Sarika and Kamal’s daughter, it irked her when she was young and people asked her about her father. “People would constantly ask me about him, it was like all the time. I would feel like, I am Shruti, I want my own identity. People would point at me and say, ‘Hey, that’s Kamal’s daughter’. If anyone asked me, I would say, ‘No, my father is Dr Ramachandran’, it was our dentist’s name. ‘And I am Pooja Ramachandran’, a name I made up.”

She also said that she knew her father was unlike anyone she had met and that being in Chennai made it difficult for her to escape his fame. “It’s not just that my dad is an actor or a famous person, I knew from childhood that he was different from anyone I met. I was brought up by two stubborn people and that rubbed off on me and my sister. I moved to Bombay when they separated. I never enjoyed being Shruti here (in Chennai). It’s difficult to separate from his fame when there are Appa’s posters all over the place. Today, I don’t even want to imagine Shruti without Kamal Haasan.”

On the work front, Shruti was last seen in Prashanth Neel’s Salaar Part 1 - Ceasefire. She will soon be seen in the film’s sequel Salaar Part 2 and Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Coolie also starring Rajnikanth.