Nawazuddin Siddiqui: 'Was paid Rs 22,000 for Munna Bhai MBBS, people thought I was a criminal when they saw...'

Nawazuddin Siddiqui has had a tumultuous but ultimately a terrific journey as an actor so far. For his first breakthrough role in the 1999 Sarfarosh in which he had a cameo, the actor told Bollywood Bubble in an interview, “When people saw the film, they thought the makers have cast an actual criminal, maybe have cast a robber or somebody. A lot of people told this to me.”

Siddiqui added, “So when I used to go to other production houses, they used to ask me, ‘what work have you done before?’ I used to be like, ‘Sarfarosh’, it was a megahit. They used to be shocked and ask, what did you do in Sarfarosh? Then I used to narrate my shot to them and they used to be like, ‘Oh, so it was you?’ I said, ‘yes’.”

On Munna Bhai MBBS

For my role in Munna Bhai MBBS, I got paid well. Big names were associated with it, they had good money. I was paid well. I think I earned around Rs 20k to 22k for my role. Other roles used to pay from 1k to 5k. We used to go crazy, when we used to get paid Rs 5k. We used to be extremely happy.

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Siddiqui also tried his hands at Tamil and Telugu films recently with his debut ventures like Petta (2019) and Saindhav (2024) respectively. That being said, while Nawazuddin’s debut Tamil film got him the chance to work with the legendary Rajinikanth, the actor recently revealed how he felt guilty after working on the 2019 film. The actor said about feeling like doing a “fraud” with the film and taking money for nothing.