Sidharth Malhotra’s prank on My Name is Khan set made Adarsh Gourav fear for his job: ‘I thought they’d fire me if…’

“Even back then, I felt that they were very striking, and I used to wonder why they’re assistants,” Adarsh said in Hindi. “It’s not like good-looking people can’t do regular things, but they looked like stars. I even asked Varun, ‘Bro, don’t you want to be an actor?’ He didn’t tell me that he was David Dhawan’s son; I knew him only as Varun.”

Adarsh also recalled a prank that Sidharth played on him. He said, “I’ll never forget this. There’s a shot in which I’m riding a bicycle, and Sidharth was like, ‘Do you know how to swim?’ I told him I didn’t, and he said, ‘Oh no, actually you have to swim across the stream to the other side, and you have to get out and then continue with the scene.’ I was stressed out for an entire hour, and I was afraid they’d fire me if I told them I didn’t know how to swim. I decided to stay quiet, ‘Jai Mata Di, let’s rock’. And before the scene started, I realised he was just messing around. Well played, full power.”

Adarsh was in high school at the time, and he broke out after starring in Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger. He has also appeared in the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations, and was most recently seen in the Netflix show Guns & Gulaabs. He will also star in Kho Gaye Hum Kahan, and Alien prequel series created by Noah Hawley.