'Six vans for one person? Ridiculous,' says Dhruv Vikram about the entourage costs, demands of actors in Bollywood, Ishaan Khatter recalls doing his own laundry cooking on a Hollywood set

The rising entourage cost of actors and how it burdens the producers is a discussion which has been happening for a while now. This has caused a lot of debate and in a recent round table conversation actor Dhruv Vikram expressed shock over the same. This roundtable also included other actors like Kriti Sanon, Vicky Kaushal, Ishaan Khatter, Rukmini Vasanth, Basil Joseph, Kalyani Priyadarshan, apart from Dhruv.

While Kriti and Vicky clarified that they have not personally witnessed excessive demands or a single actor being assigned as many as six vanity vans, Ishaan pointed out that actors in the Hindi film industry are often excessively pampered. Sharing her perspective, Kriti told The Hollywood Reporter, “I don’t know if actors can solve this, but it has to be a combination of like a certain entourage being there, producers being there and cutting out what is not needed, Everything that is luxury. For example, when it comes to trainers and dieticians, I had a dietician for Mimi because it was for the film specifically. I was required to gain weight for it. It was very specific. Similarly, if you’re doing an action film and you need a certain kind of training for that action, I understand that. But otherwise, I feel like if you are taking your cook and all of that… I don’t understand that. Because then it is your personal cost. Then you are doing it for yourself.” She further added, “I haven’t seen those six vanity vans.”


Dhruv Vikram agreed with Kriti and initially said, “I have never heard about that before in my life.” However, once he realised the discussion referred to six vanity vans being allotted to a single actor, he reacted strongly, saying, “Six vans for one person? That’s ridiculous.” The Tamil actor noted that such practices were unfamiliar to him, while the Bollywood actors acknowledged that although they do not make such demands themselves, they are aware that the issue exists in the Hindi film industry.

Ishaan then shared insights from his experience working on the Hollywood series 'The Perfect Couple', which featured Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber. He revealed that there was no special treatment on the set and that he handled all his daily chores on his own.

He explained, “There is an expectation because it has been normalised. Actors are very mollcoddled here. I did something called a Perfect Couple in Cape Cod where they just gave me a house and a car and told me to drive myself to set. I was doing my laundry every day and I was cleaning and cooking for myself. I was doing the lines while driving to set. I didn’t know a single person there and have a single person from my team, it was just 3.5 months of that.”

Khatter further added, “That is one way of working as well, but our systems have made it so… It’s also a cultural thing. It’s in India that we have a lot of help, and that creates jobs, but I think where the limit should be, it is like an individual question, it can’t be the expectation that generally things happen this way. It also depends on what the project needs.”


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