Neena Gupta, an actor, remembers feeling anxious both during and after recording her first on-screen kiss. In the upcoming Netflix anthology film Lust Stories 2, Neena is slated to play the lead role. Neena admitted in an interview that the event left her feeling so scared that she cleaned her lips with an antibiotic. This occurred in the early 1990s while she was working on the television programme Dillagi.
According to Neena, it was unheard of in those days to display physical affection on broadcast, thus the channel’s attempt to market the episode by claiming it had the first on-camera kiss in Indian TV history backfired. According to her, “As an actor you have to do all kinds of scenes, sometimes you have to step in mud, sometimes you have to stand in the sun for several hours.” she said in an interview with Inside Bollywood.
She continued in Hindi, recalling the kissing encounter, “Many years ago, I worked on a series with Dilip Dhawan. The lip-to-lip kissing moment was a first for Indian television. I had trouble sleeping all night. We weren’t quite friends; he was just someone I knew. Although he was attractive, it doesn’t really matter in these circumstances because I wasn’t prepared psychologically or physically. Despite my anxiety, I forced myself to follow through.
Neena consciously reminded herself that she is an actor and that she must go past this. It’s similar to how some people can’t do humour or cry on television. I repeated it over and over until I did it. I immediately cleaned my mouth with Dettol after it was over. I had such a hard time kissing someone I didn’t know.
The television network used the footage to advertise the episode because it believed it had hit gold. Neena said that it backfired on them. She said that there weren’t many TV channels back then, families would often watch TV together, and many viewers were horrified by the kissing scene. Neena explained, “They had to remove it.”
Neena explained, “They had to remove it.” She ended by saying, “I did a love scene in Utsav, it was very difficult.”
The sequel to Netflix’s popular anthology series from 2018 is called Lust Stories 2, although it was created by a different group of filmmakers. This time, Sujoy Ghosh, Amit Ravindernath Sharma, R Balki, and Konkona Sen Sharma each directed one of the four short films.
