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Director Sriram Raghavan said that it’s generally a bad idea to write films with certain actors in mind, because you invariably end up writing in cliches, or serving that actor’s tropes. He recalled a story about being approached by Sunny Deol, who was impressed with a documentary he’d directed in the early ’90s. He also opened up about casting Varun Dhawan in Badlapur, even though he’d initially designed the character for an older actor.
In an interview with Galatta Plus, Sriram was asked about his quirky casting, which often goes against the grain. His new film, Merry Christmas, features the unlikely pair of Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi. He said, “If I keep an actor in mind on the blank page, it’s damn tough. You end up writing cliched stuff that’s already been done. Many years back, I’d not even made a single film, Sunny Deol happened to see (the Raman Raghav documentary), he called me and said, ‘Let’s do something’.”
Sriram continued, “Few months I was just enjoying myself, thinking, ‘I’m doing a film for Sunny Deol’. But I was not writing anything of any value. I realised I ended up doing what I’d seen before. This was Sunny after Damini and all, when he was absolutely on top. Now he’s back in the reckoning, which is good.” The filmmaker also spoke about the unusual casting of the then one-film-old Varun Dhawan in Badlapur. He said that it was rather ‘daring’ of the actor to do the film, and that he was very good in it. “It’s a wonderful performance,” he said.
But, he said, Varun wasn’t his first choice. “I think I’m getting too much credit for this,” he said about his out-of-the-box casting. “For Badlapur, I had someone much older in my mind… I had proper actors in mind, like Irrfan. Then (producer Dinesh Vijan) felt what if it’s someone young. Someone like Varun, who’d just done Student of the Year. It so happened that he called me up at that time, so I said, ‘Okay, let’s call him and test it out with him’. Then he asked me the same day, ‘Do you really think I can do it?’ In my head, I’m thinking, ‘I have no idea’. I actually had no idea, but you sort of say, ‘Why not?'”
Sriram said that Varun delivered, but speculated that he might not have done the film if he had a bunch of hits under his belt. Badlapur, along with Shoojit Sircar’s October, remains his most acclaimed performance. Sriram is now gearing up for the release of Merry Christmas, after which he’ll move on to Ikkis, starring Agastya Nanda and Dharmendra.
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