‘Ridiculous’: Dhruv Vikram reacts to Bollywood star arriving on set with 6 vanity vans; Ishaan Khatter says did own laundry on Hollywood set

‘Six vanity vans for one actor is ridiculous’

Dhruv Vikram echoed Kriti’s views and said, “I have never heard about that before in my life.” However, he later realised that the group was talking about six vans being allotted to one actor. Reacting to this, he said, “Six vans for one person? That’s ridiculous.” The Tamil actor said he had not heard of such a thing while Bollywood actors accepted that while they don’t make such demands personally, they were aware of the problem in the Hindi film industry.

Ishaan did his own laundry, cleaning while shooting Hollywood show

Ishaan Khatter then chimed in and shared his experience of shooting the Hollywood web series The Perfect Couple, which starred Nicole Kidman and Liev Schreiber in lead roles. Ishaan admitted that he was not given any star treatment on the show and had to manage his own laundry, cooking and cleaning.

He said, “There is an expectation because it has been normalised. Actors are very mollycoddled here. I did something called a Perfect Couple in Cape Cod where they just gave me a house and a car and told me to drive myself to set. I was doing my laundry every day and I was cleaning and cooking for myself. I was doing the lines while driving to set. I didn’t know a single person there and have a single person from my team, it was just 3.5 months of that.”

He added, “That is one way of working as well, but our systems have made it so… It’s also a cultural thing. It’s in India that we have a lot of help, and that creates jobs, but I think where the limit should be, it is like an individual question, it can’t be the expectation that generally things happen this way. It also depends on what the project needs.”

Also read – As star fees, entourage costs skyrocket, Hindi film industry technicians, writers and actors ‘bleed’: Bollywood’s horror show

Shocking entourage claims that emerged in the past

Several actors and producers have openly spoken about rising entourage costs in the past. Recently, filmmaker Sanjay Gupta spoke about Bollywood’s escalating entourage cost issue. He was the one who revealed a South director fired Bollywood actor for reaching the sets with 6 vanity vans. “This particular actor signed a film down south. He went for the shoot, and they went to the location, which is a studio. And suddenly, the producer finds that there are these six vans from Bombay, and he’s like, ‘I didn’t hire six actors’. See, to a certain level, you indulge. But then he was told, ‘Yeh saab ka vans hai, aur yeh raato raat Bombay se aaya hai, aapka ek din bach gaya (These are sir’s vans, and they’ve been brought in overnight from Mumbai, so you saved a day). He wanted to give all sorts of gaalis.”

Sanjay also recalled how John Abraham walked onto the sets of Shootout at Wadala with a team of eight people during an interaction with Cyrus Broacha.

Trade analyst Komal Nahta once shared an instance where an actor arrived at an event and his personal stylist charged Rs 20,000 from the organiser just to fix the actor’s collar. “Even for an appearance, an actor will come with 8 to 9 people. The big star came with the costume designer, social media manager, photographer, two bouncers despite us providing security, makeup man, hairdresser,” he told Faridoon Shahryar.

Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap had also spoken about how an actor’s chef charges Rs 2 lakh per day to prepare healthy meals. Speaking to Janice Sequeira, Anurag said, “Somebody has a chef who charges Rs 2 lakh per day to make this strange healthy food. Jo dekh ke lagta tha ye khana hai? Yeh to bird feed hai (I wonder, ‘Is this food or birdfeed’)?”