Suniel Shetty recalls being held at gunpoint by cops in US after 9/11: ‘They said down or we shoot, handcuffed me’

Suniel Shetty shared, “…me being taken at gunpoint, because I had this beard. We shot after a few days and I was walking into the hotel and I went into the lift and I had forgotten my keys. So this American gentleman was there. He kept looking at me and I said ‘Do you have the keys? Because I have forgotten mine and my staff has gone out.’ He ran out and created commotion. So the cops came in, from the street, gunmen and they said ‘down or we shoot.'”

Shetty said that he was completely in shock in that moment and was down on his knees. “I didn’t know what was happening. So I had to go down on my knees. They handcuffed me,” he recalled and said that it was at this point that the production crew came over to intervene, and one of the hotel managers, who was a Pakistani man, also intervened to clarify that Shetty was an actor. “And that’s when the production came, and one of the managers was a Pakistani gentleman in the hotel, he came there and he said, he is an actor. All that we’ve been through that time, it was insane. I didn’t know what was going to happen next because there was so much commotion and my beard was that jawline beard,” he recalled.

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Suniel Shetty said that he had just made a gesture for a key but was misunderstood. “I thought he didn’t understand the language, maybe he didn’t speak English. So I gestured key, lift, it worked against me.”

Kaante also starred Sanjay Dutt, Amitabh Bachchan, Kumar Gaurav and was loosely based on Reservoir Dogs.