Rajinikanth says man refused to accept he was romancing Aishwarya Rai: ‘You’re the hero?’

When the actor said he was working on a film called Enthiran, with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan playing the lead opposite him, the man’s reaction was less excitement and more confusion. “He asked, ‘Who is the hero?’ I said I was the hero,” Rajinikanth said, adding that the man’s own children, who were present at the time, had to step with confirmation before he would believe it.

What followed, by Rajinikanth’s account, was an awkward, prolonged silence. “For 10 minutes, he didn’t say a single word. He just stared at me,” he said, before the man finally said his goodbyes. As he walked off, Rajinikanth recalled overhearing him mutter to himself, “What happened to Aishwarya? What happened to Abhishek? Leave it, what happened to Amitabh sir? Aishwarya as the heroine with him?” The reference to Aishwarya’s husband, Abhishek Bachchan, and her father-in-law, Amitabh Bachchan, got laughs from audiences each time the story comes up, with Rajinikanth typically wrapping it up by turning to thank Aishwarya directly for agreeing to star opposite him despite the scepticism surrounding their pairing.

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The anecdote reflects a real conversation that was happening publicly at the time. Enthiran, directed by Shankar, marked the first on-screen pairing of Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, with a 23-year age-gap between the two leads that drew comment when the casting was first announced. The film went on to become a major commercial success and remains a cult favourite today. Robot, known as Enthiran in Tamil, cast Rajinikanth in a dual role as scientist Dr. Vaseegaran and the humanoid robot Chitti, with the story turning on Chitti developing emotions and falling for Vaseegaran’s girlfriend, Sana, played by Aishwarya.

According to the industry tracker Sacnilk, made on a budget of Rs 132 crores, was the most expensive film ever made in India. The production pulled in an unusual mix of Hollywood talent rarely seen on an Indian film set in that era, with animatronics from Stan Winston Studios, visual effects support from Industrial Light & Magic, action choreography from The Matrix’s Yuen Woo-ping, and costume design from Mary E Vogt, who had previously worked on Men in Black.

Aishwarya has spoken warmly about working with Rajinikanth in the years since, in one old interview comparing him to her father in law, saying both actors carry a similar sense of humility despite their towering status in the industry, and crediting their professionalism and body of work for why audiences never really treated the age gap as an issue once the film released.

The scale of its release matched its ambition. Enthiran opened on roughly 2,250 prints across about 3,000 screens worldwide, reportedly the widest release for any film after Spider-Man at the time, with 1,400 of those screens in Tamil Nadu alone, including 48 of Chennai’s 52 screens. It released simultaneously in Tamil, Telugu, as Robo, and Hindi, as Robot, with separate launch events held in Kuala Lumpur, Hyderabad and Mumbai, the Hyderabad event drawing Chiranjeevi among other guests. A.R. Rahman’s soundtrack, including the songs Kilimanjaro and Boom Boom Robo Da, became a major part of the film’s identity.

The pairing that once left a neighbour speechless went on to anchor a franchise. Enthiran’s 2018 sequel, 2.0, brought Akshay Kumar into the mix as the antagonist and collected Rs 690 crore worldwide gross.