The Movie and Me

A spiritual fantasy drama directed by Nagesh Kukunoor.
Produced by Percept Picture Company, T Series.

I played Rahul Sharma, a former gambler struggling to come to terms with terminal illness.

After a lifetime of gambling, Rahul wins 3 crore rupees. He asks his girlfriend, Nafisa to marry him but mysteriously collapses straight after. After various tests he finds out that he has lung cancer.

Knowing that he only has months to live, Rahul leaves his fiancée with most of the money and travels to a distant seaside hospice. There he strikes up relationships with several other patients and helps to make their last wishes come true. But as his illness progresses, he begins to have strange, symbolic dreams in which he appears as his hero, Indiana Jones. Are they just manifestations of his disease, or are stranger forces at work?

"Nagesh asked me to lose weight as the film progressed. He wanted me to look healthy in the beginning and gradually deteriorate, so we shot the film in sequence, something that is very rarely done, but it left little time for me to lose weight.

I cut down on my food drastically and ran a lot on a treadmill. I didn't realise that eventually I would lose more than 16 kilos, more than anybody had imagined... I got so thin that Nagesh confessed afterwards that he was really worried about me. It was very debilitating and took me several months to recuperate once the shoot was over. Today I can empathise a lot with people who want to lose weight as it is not an easy task."