Imtiaz Ali thought Kareena Kapoor had ‘no idea what she’s doing’ while shooting Jab We Met, because all she could talk about was Tashan

Kareena Kapoor said that all she could talk about while shooting Jab We Met was her big YRF movie, Tashan.

New Delhi | October 14, 2023 06:56 PM IST

3 min read

Shahid Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor's Jab We Met was released in theatres in 2007.

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Actor Kareena Kapoor said that she didn’t understand how impactful the film Jab We Met was going to be for her when she was in the process of making it, because she was more concerned about the film Tashan, which she was working on simultaneously. Kareena admitted that even director Imtiaz Ali must’ve been sure that she was missing the magic of the moment.

In a new interview with mid-day, Kareena said that Shahid Kapoor was the one who was first approached by Imtiaz, and that the film was initially titled Geet, after the character that she would eventually play. She signed on to the project, thinking of it as just another movie, and the whole time that she was working on Jab We Met, all she could do was ‘talk about Tashan’, which she felt would be a massive career milestone for her.

Also read | Kareena Kapoor answers why Kapoor women never worked in the movies, says dad Randhir asked Karisma to ‘figure it out yourself’ for debut film

But as luck would have it, Jab We Met emerged as her most memorable film, while Tashan bombed spectacularly. “I didn’t even manifest it. I was actually without work for a year and a half, because I was saying no to films; I wasn’t getting the kind of films that I wanted… I never knew it would be this iconic movie. Even Imtiaz always looked at me like, ‘You’re not understanding what this character is, you don’t know what you’re doing’,” Kareena said.

And she didn’t catch on even during filming. “I was like, ‘What is this Geet? I’m coming with Tashan, it’s going to blow the world away’, which it did, but it wasn’t that movie, it was this. Throughout shooting Jab We Met, all I did was talk about Tashan. Imtiaz must’ve really thought, ‘She has no idea’. And that’s what worked. I actually had no idea.”

Released in 2007, Jab We Met has emerged as an enduring success. But it also spelled doom for Shahid and Kareena’s relationship. She eventually started seeing Saif Ali Khan, whom she met during Tashan, and they tied the knot in 2012. In a 2017 interview with HuffPost, actor Bobby Deol presented a different account of what happened. He claimed that he was the one who was first approached for Jab We Met, and that he’d suggested to Imtiaz that he consider Kareena for the female lead role. Kareena, he said, got him replaced with Shahid.

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