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Actor Alia Bhatt, who is set to collaborate with director Sanjay Leela Bhansali for the second time on the upcoming film Love and War, was destroyed when their planned first collaboration fell apart at the last moment. It wasn’t the first time that Alia’s chances of working with the celebrated filmmaker had been foiled by fate. She was first in talks with him for a film called Balika Vadhu, which would’ve featured her now-husband Ranbir Kapoor. They entered talks again for a film titled Inshallah, co-starring Salman Khan. By then, Alia had already become an established star. When the project fell apart, Bhansali recalled, Alia ranted and raved in disappointment.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, he recalled, “I was doing Inshallah with her, and suddenly the project got shelved. She broke down, she cracked up, she cried, raved, ranted, locked herself in a room. Then, I called her up after one week and said, ‘You’re playing Gangubai’. She said, ‘I was going to play a character in Los Angeles and now I’ve come to Kamathipura, how will I do it? I don’t know this character’.”
Also read – Alia Bhatt auditioned for Black at the age of 9: ‘Sanjay Leela Bhansali saw that fire in my eyes’
Bhansali said that he asked Alia to trust him. “I will tap into that strong woman in you, because I can see it in your eyes. I can see how convinced you are of certain things, because of your personality,” he told her. “That is my job as a director… How do you tap into an actor, and then they say, ‘I didn’t know I could play a brothel madame, I didn’t know I had a lower pitch, I didn’t know I could stand and do this, I started enjoying it’. She just flew into the role. Even today, sometimes, she talks like Gangubai,” he said.
Bhansali and Alia worked together on the film Gangubai Kathiawadi, which emerged as one of the earliest pandemic-era hits and further cemented Alia’s stardom. The filmmaker’s most recent project is the Netflix series Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar. Alia, on the other hand, will be seen in the film Jigra this week. Praising her experience with Bhansali, she once told Vogue Singapore, “Once you walk out of a Sanjay Leela Bhansali set, you’re no longer the same person. Like Ranveer [Singh] says, you’ve been ‘Bhansali-fied’.”
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