MUMBAI: Director Sriram Raghavan is a popular filmmaker in the Hindi film industry. His latest offering Merry Christmas is soon to hit the cinemas. While he first offered the film to Saif Ali Khan, he later had a change of heart and cast Vijay Sethupathi in the lead. He consoled a visibly annoyed Saif that he would make it up to him.
Opening up about it, Raghavan told a news portal, “This story is from a different era. If I’d just taken the bare-bones plot, I could’ve made an episode of CID… I love Saif as an actor, although our last film didn’t work. That time he wasn’t doing so much, so I thought he’d be fun. I went to meet him, he loved the story, said, ‘Great, let’s do it’. And then, I started fleshing it out.”
The director further said, “When I was fleshing it out, I suddenly felt that the story needed an X-factor that we might not get from a conventional pairing. Saif and Katrina had done more than a couple of movies together. So, I went to my producer and told him, ‘I think think I’ve made a mistake, I don’t think it’s working out’. He said, ‘You better go and tell him now’”
He continued, “How do you go and tell him? The last time you met, he hugged you and everything,” he added. “It wasn’t that he was a problem. I could have done the film (with him) also, but it’s just that as I was writing it, something wasn’t clicking, I don’t know what… It was a very tough thing to go and tell him. He was naturally p****d off. I said, ‘Some day I hope to make up…”
The incident took place in 2018 when he didn’t have a replacement actor in mind. Sriram and Saif have never collaborated on a project before. Merry Christmas will hit the cinemas on 12th January in Hindi and Tamil.
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credit-IndianExpress
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