Rakesh Roshan recalls shooting incident after Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, says underworld wanted Hrithik Roshan to do a film for them

Rakesh Roshan said that the underworld wanted Hrithik Roshan's to star in a film financed by them but he refused to give in.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | January 14, 2025 09:12 PM IST

2 min read

Rakesh Roshan recalled the shooting incident after the release of Hrithik Roshan's Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai. (Photo: Express Archives)

For the Roshan family, January of the year 2000 was a roller-coaster ride. After Rakesh Roshan directorial Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai, which launched his son Hrithik Roshan, released on January 14, Hrithik was heralded as the next big thing in Bollywood. But, just a week later, Rakesh was shot in broad daylight in Mumbai as he was getting out of his office. After getting shot with two bullets, the director drove himself to the hospital and had a miraculous recovery. The shooting incident was linked to the underworld that had a strong presence in the film industry at the time. Many actors and filmmakers would get threatening calls during the late 1990s and early 2000s and after the assassination of Gulshan Kumar in 1997, it became apparent that the underworld wasn’t making empty threats.

Rakesh, in a recent chat with Bollywood Hungama, shared that the underworld criminals wanted Hrithik to work in a film that would be financed by them but when he refused, he had to face the consequences. “I never gave any indication that Hrithik could do a film for them. I kept putting them off saying Hrithik had no dates, which in any case, was the truth. They then asked me to take dates away from other producers and give it to them. This again, I refused to do,” he said.

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Rakesh Roshan said that he was determined to not give in to their demands and recalled that there was a lot of “tension and fear” in those days because of the criminal elements. “Once I had committed my son’s dates elsewhere, I refused to give into arm twisting tactics. I never gave in. With the kind of tension and fear that some of us had to bear, we couldn’t do anything creative, let alone make a film,” he said.

In an interview given shortly after the incident to Simi Garewal, Hrithik Roshan shared that he wanted to quit films as he felt “directly or indirectly responsible” for Rakesh’s shooting.

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