Thank god for Emraan Hashmi: SRK, Saif and other married stars who dont' kiss onscreen

We have always been familiar with terms like ‘The Action Hero’ or ‘The Chocolate Boy’, however, just like it took an Amitabh Bachchan for ‘Angry Young Man’ to become a label and a Shah Rukh Khan for us to understand how a ‘King of Romance’ would be like, without Emraan Hashmi we could have never coined or comprehended the phrase, ‘Serial Kisser’. Although today the new crop of actors — from Alia Bhatt, Parineeti Chopra to Siddharth Malhotra and Varun Dhawan — have very little inhibition about kissing onscreen, Hashmi calls them amateurs. “Someone asked me that the new kids started doing (kissing) it on the screen, but I feel very foolish to say this, but it’s more evolved after years of practice…,” said Hashmi. “The things what I do these amateurs can’t do.. I know they mean well, I know they put in their hard work… but I have like 1000 hours of experience compared to like 10 hours of theirs,” added the 35-year-old. [caption id=“attachment_1684531” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] Hashmi takes his kissing scenes with the seriousness with which work should be treated and wears the tag of ‘Serial Kisser’ quite proudly. When asked about his the smooches, he often has a cheeky answer ready for the press as well. What is great about Hashmi’s approach is the casualness with which he treats his kissing scenes as if they were like any other scenes of the film. In a place like Bollywood where stars are said to have ’no kissing’ clauses in their contracts, it is indeed rare. To add to it, Hashmi is a married man for last eight years and is a father to a four-year-old boy, Ayaan and there are very few married Bollywood actors who would so readily kiss onscreen, as Hashmi does. More often than not, actors who were once open to onscreen lip locks change their stance about it after marriage and while there are still some like Vidya Balan, Hrithik Roshan and Aamir Khan who does smooch onscreen, but reports suggest that it takes a lot of persuasion from the directors. Also, for a married Indian actor (male and/or female) there is always a question of how the spouse would react when they see them making out with others on celluloid. Saif Ali Khan, who had kissed actresses like Rani Mukerji (Hum Tum) and Preity Zinta (Salam Namaste) before his marriage with Kareena Kapoor is currently under a kissing ban, imposed by Kapoor. However, the ban also works on Kapoor, as she isn’t allowed to lip lock with her leading men either. This ban has in turn effected their chemistry with co-stars. If you take note of the releases these two actors have had after their marriage in 2012, their body language towards their co-stars have also changed considerably. Since Cocktail (2012), Khan practically kept all his actresses at an arm’s length in his films and in films like Gori Tere pyaar Mein, Kapoor had as much chemistry with his co-star as sisters have with their brothers. While Kapoor-Khan have laid down ground rules and are abiding by it as far as kissing goes. Other actors, like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan does bend their kissing laws after considerable persuasions. Aishwarya Rai has never smooched anyone onscreen till Dhoom2 happened. The much talker about but damp squib of a kiss became a big issue especially because the film released a year before her marriage to Abhishek Bachchan in 2007. Reports were doing rounds that the her in-laws, the Bachchans, weren’t very happy with the kiss. The actress also received several legal notices for the scene. She later opened up about kissing in her famous interview with Sir David Frost. The actress said, “I had already declined a couple of scripts purely on the basis of not being comfortable with the very physical scenes and the kissing because I’d never done that on screen and I just wasn’t very comfortable with the idea.” “I was actually quite convinced about it but I still said, ‘Okay, if I have to go down this path let me first do it in our cinema, in an Indian piece of cinema, and let me see if all my doubts are true’, and they were.” she added. Therefore after that, despite Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s persuasions, there was no kissing scene for Rai in Guzaarish. And although the actress still maintains that she wants to pursue her career in both Hollywood and Bollywood films, with apprehensions about something as basic as a kissing scene, how she would manage to do so, only time will tell. Not just her, kissing is still a blistering issue with the King of Romance himself. Shah Rukh Khan, who made his name being the quintessential romantic hero, managed to build his career by singing songs, but hardly ever kissing his women. While we are not sure if Khan’s better half ever had any issues with the actor getting intimate onscreen, he has always maintained that he isn’t comfortable with kissing his co-stars. However, in 2012 he did make an exception for Jab Tak Hai Jaan and lip locked with Katrina Kaif. When asked about it, the actor said, " I did it (the kiss) because the story demanded it. Believe me or don’t believe it,". While we refuse to believe that a man who made his name as a romantic hero never had a script offered to him which required him to kiss on screen, it does add to our belief that married Bollywood actors do have a lot of hang ups when it comes to kissing and so, we are even more thankful for actors like Vidya Balan and Emraan Hashmi.