Mira Nair takes a deep dive into how each actor was cast in Monsoon Wedding, from Naseeruddin Shah to Vijay Raaz

In a remarkable film career spanning over 40 years, Mira Nair has established herself as a leading voice with a strong affinity for stories of diaspora, identity, and ambition. No matter where her films take you — and they do take you to places far away — they almost always have India pulsating at their heart.

It is difficult to pick a favourite Mira Nair film. I cherish The Namesake as much as Queen of Katwe. Her Salaam Bombay! is as important as The Reluctant Fundamentalist. However, across her avant-garde filmography, no film is as raucously celebratory and representative of the big, loud chaos that are Indian weddings as her 2001 directorial Monsoon Wedding.

Today, over 20 years later, the film has amassed a cult following, and stands as a timeless example of cinema that holds a mirror to our world and shows life as we live it — where light and darkness coexist, much like all else. Cinema enthusiasts the world over love Monsoon Wedding for several reasons — how it spoke of incest at a time when the silence around it was deafening, the way it portrayed the new India — a country full of enterprise, spunk, and secrets, a country susurrating to come into its own.

But the lasting legacy of the film is its casting coup — how Nair managed to handpick and bring together an ensemble unlike any other. Unsurprisingly, the story behind each actor’s coming on board is just as fascinating and unpredictable as the characters they ended up playing in the film.

Naseeruddin Shah

The 64-year-old filmmaker calls the process of casting Monsoon Wedding unusual, determined, and extraordinary. “Because it was a really big ensemble, and often I would cast someone and they would not show up and I’d have to cast someone else at the last minute,” she says. But fortunately, Nair had blocked her leading man— the legendary Naseeruddin Shah, who she had been wishing to work with for years.

“We had been very lucky to be able to cast Naseeruddin Shah to play Lalit Verma, the father of the bride. I had longed to work with Naseer bhai since I was 17 years old when I saw him in Zoo Story, a play, in Delhi. I was an undergraduate then. We had written Salaam Bombay! for him for Nana Patekar’s role, which he had refused. It broke my heart completely. That was 1987. So I was longing for years to work in Naseer bhai. Finally, he said yes to Lalit Verma. So I started to cast the whole film around Naseer as Lalit,” says Nair.

Shefali Shah

She next cast Shefali Shah for Ria, the bride’s older, unmarried cousin, who is sexually abused as a child by an uncle. Thinking about it, Nair says it was the only time she cast someone without even meeting them. “She was called Shefali Shetty then. I loved her work in Satya . I have never done this before meeting anyone but I just called her and said, ‘Shefali, would you please be Ria in our movie?’ And she immediately said yes. She was an extraordinary Ria,” says Nair, complementing the actor, who has since then done some terrific roles, most recently alongside Vidya Balan in the Amazon Prime Video India film Jalsa.

Lillete Dubey

Next came Nair’s old friend Lillete Dubey, who played Pimmy Verma, the bride’s mother in the movie. But Nair says Lillete was nothing like the image that she had of Pimmy in her mind. “We were in a theatre company together in Delhi in my undergraduate years. I love Lillete’s work. But she always struck me as this sexy, slinky, gorgeous actor. Not the Pimmy Verma — aunty ji type, nice and buxom, voluptuous and funny,”  she says.

This is how it worked out. “Lillete came to see me about casting her daughter Neha, whom I did cast in the film as Ayesha Verma. Then she asked, ‘Mira, what about me?’ I told her, ‘Lillete, you’ll have to wear a complete bodysuit, tits and ass, and everything.’ She was up for it,” says Nair, who then asked her to spend some time with a friend who she thought was “a typical Pimmi auntyji from Delhi.”

“I told Lillete to spend some time with Titli, and just come back with all of that under her belt. Lillete was very adept. She did the whole number. We got her a bodysuit that she wore the whole time. It was hilarious. It was hot in the monsoon, and I’d say, ‘Come on now, here’s the next shot.’ And she’d yell, ‘Where are my boobs? Bring me my boobs!’ She’d put them all on and do Pimmy,” laughs Nair.

Randeep Hooda

For Randeep Hooda’s character Rahul Chadha, the bride’s cousin, Nair had cast a very well-known actor but “at the last minute, he turned me down because I was not paying for his first-class ticket from America. He was based there then. I just could not afford it. It was half the budget, that ticket. So he didn’t come,” says Nair.

She then sought help from a good friend in Delhi. “I told GV Sethi, who surrounds himself with beautiful boys and girls, ‘Listen, find me a sizzler. I need someone who can turn heads. And he introduced me to this Haryanvi model Randeep Hooda. He had just come in from Australia, and he’d broken his arm. It was in a cast. He walked into my little office, and all the heads turned,” laughs Nair.

When Hooda, who had not featured in any films till then, asked Nair what he needed to do, she simply said, “Just flirt with me,” which she says he did, “very effectively.” “I thought I could make this person happen and he got the role, like the day before shooting,” says Nair.

Tillotama Shome

But it was not just Hooda who got his big break through Monsoon Wedding. The film also marked Tillotama Shome’s debut. She plays Alice, the young maid of the household. About her, Nair says, “She was in the drama group of LSR (Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi). My casting director Dilip Shankar brought her in, and I cast her on the spot. She was like an incredible dewdrop, and had the grace, the delight, and the pride of Alice.”

Vijay Raaz

It is the story of how Vijay Raaz — who plays the tent wala PK Dube — got cast that is the most fascinating.

Turns out, Nair had already finalised Paresh Rawal for the role. “I’d seen Paresh bhai two months before (we were set to shoot the film) in a play in New York, and loved him. I, of course, knew his films. He called me and really wanted this role. I think Naseer bhai had talked to him about PK Dube. I said yes immediately,” says Nair.

But when she took Shome and Dube’s three sidekicks to Mumbai to rehearse with Rawal a week before shooting, she was not expecting what met her. “When the door opened and I saw him, two months after I’d seen him on stage in New York, I was kind of shocked. Because he had gained a lot of weight and he looked like Alice’s father, not like her lover to me. I was just taken aback. He assured me that all this would not worry anyone but we were shooting in a week, and I knew we couldn’t change much. Anyway, we rehearsed, but I was suffering. I was very, very worried,” says Nair.

Finally, she told him that it could not be. “Because at the heart of Monsoon Wedding was the story of incest, of sexual abuse within the family, and I did not want the pure love story, the one without materialism, that of PK Dube and Alice, to be anything like an older man with a young girl, anything that echoed the darkness in our story,” says Nair.

Incidentally, she had met Raaz earlier in an audition but did not consider him because she had already given PK Dube to Rawal. But after turning him down, she thought of Raaz again. “This fantastic guy with this wide mouth and Gandhi ji-like ears. I didn’t know what he could do, but I just loved his look. So I called him up and asked, ‘Dilli aayenge aap?’ And he said, ‘Haan ji, aa jaunga.’”

That was that. The next day, he was on set with his little daughter Krishna, says Nair. “His wife had gone away for a funeral, and he had to bring his daughter along. We’d all hold the baby while Vijay would act.”

He was a revelation, Nair chimes as if still amazed by the happy accident. “The moment I saw him perform, I fell in love. I was just dazzled by his physicality, comedy, timing, and the way he used his body like a praying mantis. He would just do things that would make me absolutely delighted.” She admits it was Raaz’s stellar performance that expanded the scope of Dube and Alice as the shoot progressed. “Very rapidly, the film became kind of an equal two-hander between the story of the bride and the groom and the story of PK Dube and Alice,” says Nair.

Others

Because a lot of actors canceled at the last minute, Nair got in several of her own family members to play crucial parts in the film. “Since a lot of it was inspired by my family, I cast them in it. They were attractive and free and that helped,” she laughs.

“My wonderful nephew Ishaan Nair essentially played himself as Varun Verma (the bride’s younger brother). My best friend Naina Lal Kidwai’s daughter Kemaya played Aliya. All sorts of relatives were in the film,” says Nair.

To add to it, her mother catered the food during the film, making it an absolute home affair. “I meet actors like Kulbhushan Kharbanda and various friends who were in the film, and 20 years later, they’ll say, ‘Haan haan. Mazza aaya Monsoon Wedding dekh ke aur bana ke. Par aapki mother ki jo bhindi thi na. Aa ha ha. Abhi tak yaad aati hai,’” she reminisces.

When not reading books or watching films, Sneha Bengani writes about them. She tweets at @benganiwrites.

Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  and  Instagram .