Irrfan Khan was in a lot of pain during Angrezi Medium, was shrinking, recalls costume designer: ‘He wanted to die acting’

In a chat with Digital Commentary, Smriti shared, “He was in a lot of pain when we were shooting Angrezi Medium. He only told me one thing, ‘Smriti, I get very cold’, so he told me about this one brand in London, and he said that please get me warmers from there and I said sure.” Smriti recalled that he was visibly getting weaker during the course of the shoot. “During the shoot of the film also he kept shrinking. We had to add a lot of padding to his clothes in that phase. Even though we gave him a lot of layers, we still had to add a lot of padding,” she shared.

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Smriti said that even in the scenes where his character was supposed to be in a vest, they had to add padding as he was getting weaker as time went by. “In the film, we gave him a vest to wear for all the summer sequences, and even that had padding. He was ailing. His family was around him most of the time and sometimes, during the shoot, he would take a break because he was not able to cope with it,” she recalled.

She recalled that there were days when the shoot had to be called off as Irrfan couldn’t work because he was unable to cope. “There have been days on Angrezi Medium when we couldn’t shoot because he couldn’t reach the set despite trying. He was in that much pain and I think he believed that this is what I live for and I, probably, want to just die doing this and I think he did that,” she shared.

In 2018, Irrfan shared that he was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. After a long battle against the disease, he passed away in April 2020.