‘Amitabh Bachchan had an absolutely cold expression on his face’: Balki recalls ’embarrassing’ mistake he made in first narration to Big B

Also read – Amitabh Bachchan was so punctual, he wordlessly traumatised a film crew to the point that they didn’t sleep all night: Prahlad Kakkar recalls anecdote

Balki continued, “I was narrating the film to him, and there was poker-faced silence. As a human being, you expect somebody to laugh at your jokes, and he’s the first person I’m narrating the script to in my life. Stone cold silence. And you don’t look at Amitabh Bachchan when you’re narrating. You keep your eyes on the script, but it starts bothering you that nobody is laughing, there’s no reaction, has he gone to sleep? I looked up, and he had this absolutely cold expression. Then I suddenly realised why he’s looking at me like that. I was reading the whole script to him in his voice. I was imitating him. To behave like Bachchan to Bachchan is the biggest embarrassment in the world.”

Balki said that he made a beeline for the door the second he was done with the narration. In a recent interview, Abhishek also described how nerve-wracking the experience of narrating a story to his illustrious father can be, as he recalled Bachchan’s reaction to a story that he’d pitched to him prior to making his acting debut. “We narrated the whole script, there was silence afterwards. My father looked at us, and said, ‘Boys, bakwas script hai, get out’,” Abhishek said in a recent interview with Galatta Plus.