Sunny Leone's Bollywood Debut in Jism 2: A Story of Controversy and Accidental Casting

Sunny Leone may have made waves recently in Anurag Kashyap’s 2023 neo-noir crime thriller Kennedy, but the start of her journey in Bollywood was mired in controversies . An adult star before she relocated to India, Sunny made her Bollywood debut with Pooja Bhatt’s 2012 erotic thriller Jism 2, a sequel to Pooja’s 2003 hit, starring Bipasha Basu and John Abraham. On a recent podcast, Pooja’s father and veteran filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt recalled how they ended up casting Sunny in Jism 2. Pooja, who wanted to make the sequel to Jism, began advertising it with a striking silhouetted image, even before casting anyone. When that image created tremendous buzz, she was under pressure to cast someone soon and begin the film. Around the same time, Colors TV roped in Sunny as a wild card contestant on its popular reality show, Bigg Boss 5. “There was some kind of noise being made around it — ‘How can you, in a country like India, get an adult star on a show that’s going to come into every household?’ India is a very different culture,” Mahesh said on The Rashmmi Virag Show. He recounted that his friend Raj Nayak, Chief Operating Officer of Viacom18, which owned Colors TV, came up to him and suggested Bhatt enter the Bigg Boss 5 house and cast Sunny in one of his films, given he’s known for casting “audaciously”. “He was a bit worried that he’ll have agitation outside his outfit in Mumbai and also where they were shooting,” recalled Mahesh. After the filmmaker met Sunny in the house and realized that they could make her act, he ended up recommending her to Pooja for Jism 2. Even though Jism 2 emerged as a box office success, it could never match up to the tall expectations set by casting of Sunny Leone. “There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy we have. In fact, a distributor came and bought the picture at a phenomenal price. So, I remember telling him, ‘Either you’re a fool or there’s something I don’t see in the film. Because why would you pay a price like this for a film like this? And you haven’t even watched the film,'” recounted Mahesh. “So, he said, ‘She’s the most searched girl on Google in India. That shows her popularity irrespective of what the film is,'” he added. Mahesh attributes the film’s underwhelming performance of Jism 2 at the box office to this very same ‘hypocrisy’. “They didn’t want to see an adult star wanting to becoming a wife. They expected to see an adult star becoming a more naked and raw porn star. In fact, it offered the other kind of a story. So, that was the narrative flaw because the expectations were something else, and we delivered something else,” argued the filmmaker. “But in spite of the negative buzz, the film became a box office success because of the initial crowd it pulled in. It was 100% all over the first three days, and that was one of the reasons why it soared to a figure of Rs 30 crore in the first run. And it was a moderately made film,” added Mahesh. But he describes casting Sunny at best as an “accident” and a “coincidence” instead of a “pure act of audacity” as is perceived by many now in hindsight. “Yes, there was an audacity in casting her but as Justice Katju says, ‘Every saint has a past, and every criminal has a future.’ He was the only man who said why there’s such hue and cry about Sunny Leone. She was an adult star, but she can’t continue being a that and turn over a new leaf,” said Mahesh, referring to former Chief Justice of India Markandey Katju. Mahesh primarily credits Pooja for introducing Sunny in Bollywood since she was both the director and producer of Jism 2. He’s also happy to see Sunny grow from strength to strength as an actor, particularly when her film Kennedy premiered at the Cannes Film Festival three years ago. “I was happy when Anurag Kashyap cast her, and she went to Cannes. She was sharing a platform which was very respectable,” he said. Pooja, on the other hand, has maintained that she proactively wanted to cast Sunny Leone in not only Jism 2, but also the first Jism. “At the time, my office contacted her manager in America, and they told us that she had just signed a contract with Penthouse, and so it wouldn’t be possible because she had a professional commitment. So we forgot about it. So, of course we went to Bipasha, and have no regrets,” Pooja told journalist Siddharth Kannan in 2023. Also Read — ‘Stop embarrassing your partner’: Kangana Ranaut hits back at Hrithik for ‘teasing’ her Sunny’s name then came up again while casting for Jism 2, a suggestion that shocked her business partner and actor Dino Morea. He hesitatingly said, “She is very pretty, very beautiful, but…” “The big question was how can we cast somebody who has been an adult entertainer… Two weeks after that, she was in the Bigg Boss house,” recalled Pooja.