New Delhi: Actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui has taken aim at the growing use of paid publicity in the film industry, saying it is shaping how audiences judge an actor’s talent.
In an interview with Zoom, Siddiqui said viewers are increasingly susceptible to manufactured praise.
“If I pay 10 people to talk about someone and say they’re a good actor, people will start believing it. Then an 11th person will say the same thing,” he said, questioning what happens to the audience’s own judgment.
He argued that reputation today is built as much on visibility and online chatter as on performance.
“Where has the audience’s ability to analyse gone?” he asked, adding that people may need to “educate themselves” rather than rely on amplified narratives.
Siddiqui described the moment as “strange”, with perception often overtaking the work itself. Without naming anyone, he pointed to social media cycles, promotion, and online noise as factors that shape how actors are seen.
He also addressed the backlash to his “fake films” remark, an earlier comment about films that feel inauthentic. The clip went viral and was read by some as a dig at recent releases, including Dhurandhar.
“It’s not necessary that I am talking about recently released films,” he said, adding that he meant it more broadly—“even about films from the ’70s and ’80s”—and was not targeting any one project.
Pushing back against the focus on big-ticket productions, Siddiqui pointed to the industry’s scale mismatch.
“The budget of our entire film is what a big film spends in a day,” he said, highlighting the vastly different conditions under which smaller projects are made and released.
He also flagged structural issues in casting, arguing that biases around appearance and skin colour remain deeply embedded.
“There’s a deeper problem than nepotism—it’s the bias around looks and skin colour,” he said. “Who decides what beauty is? Let people decide, not the system.”
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)