‘I was dying’: Sanjay Dutt recalls begging dad Sunil Dutt for help after seeing himself in mirror, has been clean for 40 years now

He said, “The turning point was me. One morning I woke up, went to the bathroom, and I saw myself, and I got scared. I could see I was dying. My face looked like something else. So I went to my father (Sunil Dutt) for help at that time, and he helped me and stood by me. I was one of the lucky ones who was sent, in those days, to a rehab in America. I spent two years in that rehab.”

Reflecting on his time at rehab, he shared, “In those two years, I went out with the counsellors, I went by the lake, I had barbecues. I was more interactive, more talkative. I was talking about cinema, talking about this, that, everything. And I said, ‘What the hell was I wasting all these years? Instead of looking at this beautiful lake, having a barbecue, running a marathon on the highways, taking bike rides, this was something else, something I had never experienced for so many years. And I said, ‘No matter what, this is the life I want. Not what I was living.’ That was the turning point.”

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He urged young people to avoid falling into similar traps, emphasizing that change begins with oneself. When asked if he had ever felt the inclination to return to rehab after completing his treatment, he responded firmly, “Never. It’s been about more than 40-something years now. Never. Because when I look back at that life, I realise ‘that’s not me,’ and I don’t know how I did that.”

In the same conversation, Sanjay also reflected on another turbulent chapter, his imprisonment under the Arms Act following the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts. He recalled, “My father was being threatened, my sisters were being threatened. They said I had a gun, but they couldn’t prove it. So I don’t know what it was that actually put me inside there. All I can say is that it shouldn’t have taken them 25 years to realise that I was not in the TADA Act or in the bomb blast case. I don’t know why it took them 25 years to realise that, and then convict me in the Arms Act case without having a gun, without finding a gun.”

Sanjay Dutt will next be seen on the big screen in Dhurandhar, scheduled to release this Friday.