Randeep Hooda ‘stopped flushing the toilet’ and chained himself to the shower; actor recalls turning bathroom into jail cell for Sarbjit

Actor Randeep Hooda, who recently starred in and directed the biopic Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, spoke about what was previously the most difficult role that he’d ever played. He said that in order to get into the skin of Sarabjit Singh in the biopic Sarbjit, he tried to replicate the feeling of being locked in a jail cell. Sarabjit Singh was an Indian farmer who was convicted of espionage after wandering into Pakistan, where he spent several years in jail before dying in captivity.

In an appearance on the BeerBiceps podcast, Randeep looked back on his experience of playing Sarabjit on screen, and the bond that he formed with his late sister, who was played in the movie by Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. He said that he had access to a lot of the letters that Sarabjit had written to his sister in captivity. “I had read some of his letters to his family, and I’d seen a lot of photos. I kind of knew what he’d gone through. In his letters, he’d ask about his family, his village. I didn’t know how to play someone who’d been locked up in prison for 22 years,” he said.

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Randeep continued, elaborating further about his process of getting into Sarabjit’s skin, “The first thing I did was I stopped flushing the toilet. I would switch off the bathroom lights, and I’d chain my hands and feet and lock myself around the shower area. I would spend time there. It was very difficult in the beginning. I would write letters to my director Omung Kumar, which I never actually sent to him.”

In the same interview, Randeep also spoke about losing a lot of weight for the Savarkar biopic, and spending time in his cell at the Cellular Jail. “I would have only water, black coffee and green tea,” he said, adding, “Then I added chilla to my diet, some dark chocolate and nuts… I began to lose sleep, I fell down a couple of times on set.”

Sarbjit was released to mixed response in 2016; the movie emerged as a moderate box office hit. The Savarkar biopic was released on March 22, and has so far not been able to recover its reported Rs 20 crore budget, some of which Randeep funded by selling of personal property.