Months after Deepika Padukone demanded an 8-hour workday, actor Keerthy Suresh has now broken down an actor’s schedule and said that even during an 8-hour workday, an actor does not get enough time to sleep. She was promoting her next film Revolver Rita in Hyderabad and said that even in an ideal scenario of working limited hours, an actor only gets 6 hours of sleep.
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“For a 9 am shift, if I have to be there by 7:30 am, I have to start from home at 6:30 am and wake up by 5:30 am,” pointed out Keerthy. After the pack-up around 6 or 6:30 pm, she has to travel back home, change, exercise, have dinner, and struggle to find enough hours to sleep. “Now, I have to wake up at 5:30 am after sleeping at 11:30 pm,” she added.
Keerthy underlined how even the eight-hour work shift, which is considered an ideal scenario, barely factors in time to sleep, when the ideal requirement for an adult body is eight hours of sleep. “We say eight hours of sleep is good, but we hardly get to sleep for six hours. And this is in an ideal 9-6 shift,” she argued. She added that Hindi and Malayalam film industries often have 12-hour shifts.
Keerthy also turned the attention towards the film crew, especially the lightmen, who are often the first ones to arrive and the last ones to leave the set. “Lightmen in Kerala sleep 2-3 hours. However, sleep is just as important as food or exercise,” she said. She mentioned that the Tamil and Telugu industries are more receptive towards institutionalising eight-hour work shifts, especially for the actors.
Even Deepika had earlier advocated better working conditions for the film crew. “I will begin with the hours that we work, especially for the crew. There is this sense that if you make people work extra work over time and continuously, you get it done faster. My thinking is the exact opposite — if you give people enough downtime and rest, they come back with better energy. That helps them work faster and the quality of the output is far better,” she said in a 2022 interview with Film Companion.
“Step 2 is to be compensated for overtime. Actors still feel it is my film at the end of the day. Actors, at the end of the day, are going to walk away with the awards and the rewards, and so do the directors and everyone above board. But I think the crew come in much earlier and they leave much later. So, there would be some days where you would do overtime and some technical issues or something else might happen, but then we need to find a mechanism that they are at least compensated for the overtime, on the hourly basis,” she added.
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The 8-hour workday debate started after Deepika walked out of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Spirit, and later, it was announced that she was no longer a part of Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD. She will be next seen opposite Shah Rukh Khan in Siddharth Anand’s action thriller King next year.
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