‘Akshay Kumar read dialogues written on someone’s back’: Co-actor says star struggled with long scenes

Bhalla further shared a humorous moment that occurred while shooting the same scene. He said, “During the shot, the person on whose back the dialogues were written bent down. Akshay instantly said, ‘Cut, yaar.’ He pointed out that the person with the dialogues written on his back had bent down. Then Akshay told him not to bend and to stand straight, because he was reading the lines while delivering the scene. But I have to say Akshay Kumar is truly a gem of a person.”

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In the same conversation, Gopi Bhalla added that many times during Akshay Kumar’s shoots, people around him in the scene have dialogues written on their backs, or they hold placards with the lines written on them, to help him deliver. Bhalla also emphasised one key quality of the actor, saying, “One thing about him is that he never lets you realise that he is reading and then speaking his lines. That, in itself, is a remarkable quality, he doesn’t let the audience know.”

Earlier last year, filmmaker Suneel Darshan, who worked with Akshay Kumar in films such as Jaanwar, had also spoken about the actor’s difficulty in memorising dialogues. In a conversation with Vickey Lalwani, the filmmaker said, “It’s very good if an actor can memorise his lines, but for him, it was always difficult to remember complete pages of dialogues. It was manageable in the beginning because he was doing less work, but it became an issue in the later years when we worked together. We used to put placards for him to read from, and he is not the first person to do it.”