‘Chehra utar gaya hai, baal kam hain’: Govinda recalls advising Salman Khan to get surgery, change his look before Partner

In a new chat with Siddharth Kannan, Govinda shared that he came up with the idea of Salman’s physical transformation for Partner, which was produced by Salman’s brother Sohail Khan. He shared that he met up with David and Sohail and suggested that it would be good for Sohail’s company to cast Salman as the hero. He recalled saying, “We will change his personality, total… Ek new Salman. Jo pehle dekha tha voh alag tha, jo ab dekh rahe hain yeh alag hai. (The one that we saw before, and the one we will be seeing now, is completely different.) So we tried it. We could do it.”

This was the first collaboration between Salman and Govinda despite them being contemporaries and working in many of David Dhawan’s films. Govinda was asked about their working relationship and the actor said, “He is such a sincere guy. He asked me what he should do. I told Salman you have to do this and this.” He added, “Thoda sa chehra utar gaya hai, thoda sa body tayyar kar lijiye, aapke baal thoda sa aisa lag raha hai ki mujhe, thoda kam ho gaye hain toh you have to go and do something (Your face has lost its shine, your body needs to be ready, your hair are thinning out so you should do something). I don’t drink much but I had a drink or so and I said it.” Govinda claimed that it was after this conversation that Salman started exercising. “He went and got operated, started exercising. Look at Salman after Partner, he wasn’t the same as before,” he said.

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In an earlier chat shared on Lehren Retro, which was presumably shot around the time of the release, Salman had said that Partner happened “out of our love for each other.” He added, “Earlier I felt scared to work with Govinda. Think of it, how much comedy can a person do in a film? So for the first 17 years of my life, I was very scared to share screen space with Govinda.”

In another chat, producer Pahlaj Nihalani, who was a frequent collaborator with the actor, said that Govinda could not reap the rewards of Partner. He told Pinkvilla, “After Partner, everything went against him. He didn’t get any films after that. Many of his big films got shut down, including one with Priyanka Chopra. If someone stabs you in the back, there’s not even a single mark left behind. You don’t even get to know. So, he has been stabbed in the back many times.”

Directed by David Dhawan, Partner was the Hindi remake of Hitch, and also starred Lara Dutta and Katrina Kaif.