From his days as an Assistant Director in My Name Is Khan, debuting in Karan Johar’s Student Of The Year and his other sides which are not ‘calm and composed’ like the world knows, to now Nitya Mehra and Baar Baar Dekho, Sidharth Malhotra says it all on The Firstpost Show with Renil Abraham.
The show started off from where Sidharth Malhotra started off: his family. Renil asked him about how his parents reacted when he told them that he didn’t want to be a conventional doctor or an engineer, but an actor. Sidharth told us that they were surprised because they thought that he wanted to be an actor to avoid studies. He added that his parents had enough reasons to think that way because he was not good at studies and did flunk a few times. But convincing them was not a big task, they were alright in a week or so, he added on.
After a bit of modelling Sidharth went on to work as an Assistant Director in Dharma Productions’ My Name is Khan. He said that it was more than a dream come true to work on a film which had Karan Johar, Shahrukh Khan and Kajol in it. Renil asked him if he considered My Name is Khan as only a stepping stone to becoming an actor one day to which he replied that when he was on the sets of the movie, the fellow Assistant Directors were so focused on become directors in the future, even he had a few inclinations that way.
They spoke about how Student Of The Year happened. Sidharth replied with the entire story of how he went through multiple stages of audition not knowing who the director was. He just knew that he was auditioning for Dharma Productions and only at a later stage did he know that Karan Johar wanted to launch new talent. He said he almost cried when he got to know that and it felt to him like so many years of his struggle and effort was finally paying off.
There is an image of Sidharth of him being a ‘calm and composed’ guy who is slightly inhibited. Renil told him that he believes he is not that guy and that he was much more than calm and composed and did not have too many inhibitions. Sidharth replied saying Renil was right and that he did keep his cards away for a while and now he will slowly play it one by one.
After a conversation about his relationships, and other movies including one of his best releases so far in Kapoor and Sons this year, they went on talk about his recent movie by Dharma Productions and Excel Entertainment and Nitya Mehra’s directorial first: Baar Baar Dekho. With the promotions of the movie and the songs that went viral (the word ‘viral’ is an understatement when it comes to Kala Chashma), Renil asked him how he took it when the movie did not work the way it was expected to. Sidharth said that this was definitely an experience, he did learn a lot from this but felt like there were way too many negatives written about the movie. He felt like majority of the audience did not even appreciate the fact that they tried something new and that because of this writers and directors in the future would be scared to touch something different and out of the box. He said that he appreciates and respects the view of everybody but also felt like people could have been slightly more sensitive considering this was the director’s first film.
There is a lot more to this conversation, watch the full episode for that, right here, right now.