Jyotika marked her acting debut with ‘Doli Saja Ke Rakhna’, a Hindi film co-starring Akshaye Khanna. It opened to an underwhelming response at the box office and soon, Jyotika forayed into south cinema. She had been absent from Bollywood for more than 25 years until she made her comeback with ‘Shaitaan’. And now, Jyotika exclusively tells News18 Showsha that she didn’t have any filmmaker reaching out to her from Bollywood in all these years.

Talking about what she believes could be the reason behind the same, she says, “I didn’t receive an offer from Hindi films even once. I drifted into south films 27 years ago and have only worked in south films ever since. My first Hindi film didn’t run well in theatres. It’s all very formula-based. Your first film needs to run for you to get more offers.”

She also attributes it to facing competition from her female peers, who started their careers in Bollywood at the same time as her. “When I had started my career, there was an entire bandwagon of girls working with big production houses. Even my film was produced by a big banner but as fate would have it, it didn’t run. Luckily, I had signed a south film and diverted from Bollywood,” recalls Jyotika.

The ‘Kaathal: The Core and Chandramukhi’ actor adds, “I would also like to bring it to notice that even that film didn’t work at the box office. But I got a lot of films based on how my performance in it was received. That stark difference between both industries was definitely there.”

According to her, moving to Chennai and then getting married to Suriya made many in Mumbai assume that she wasn’t keen on returning to the Hindi film industry. “People in Bollywood also thought that I was a south Indian and they assumed that I don’t want to do Hindi films anymore. It was a journey and I’m still grateful about it. I did some fabulous work there. It’s not like I refrained from doing a Hindi film. It’s just that I wasn’t offered any script in so many years,” she shares.

Rajkummar Rao’s ‘Srikanth’ may mark her second release following her Bollywood comeback but she had signed it before ‘Shaitaan’. Needless to say, she was worried on the first day of its shoot. “It was very nostalgic for me to even speak in Hindi because I had left speaking the language a while ago. I was very nervous on the first two days. I did a lot of bad acting on the first day (laughs)! I kept pinching myself that I’m back to Bollywood and how!” she says.

However, playing a person from south India in Srikanth eased her eventually. “I was also very emotional because in the film, I had a certain connect with south. I love south and respect it. What a way it is to restart my journey here with a biopic of a person from south! I thought it was a beautiful blend of both worlds for me to begin with,” Jyotika states.