I was blown away: Aparshakti Khurana on working with Dimple Kapadia

For actor Aparshakti Khurana, working with stalwarts like Pankaj Kapur, Dimple Kapadia and Saurabh Shukla was more than he could have asked for. He was just excited to share screen space with the legends he grew up watching. In fact, the ‘Berlin’ actor was instantly transported to the ‘Ram Lakhan’ days when he first saw Kapadia walking onto the sets of ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’.

“Someone like me, coming from Chandigarh, could never think of having a life in Mumbai. Till today, the songs of ‘Ram Lakhan’ are so vivid in my memory. I remember the first day I saw her on the set of ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’, I was absolutely blown away by her beauty and attitude,” smiled the actor.

Aparshakti is a crucial part of Shukla’s directorial, ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’, a mature love story with Kapur and Kapadia in the lead on ‘Zee5’. It was only in 2016 that Aparshakti made his debut in ‘Dangal’. But it didn’t take long for this Chandigarh-born actor to prove his mettle as an actor. Be it ‘Badrinath Ki Dulhania’, ‘Stree’, ‘Luka Chuppi’, ‘Helmet’, ‘Bhediya’, ‘Jubilee’ or ‘Berlin’, Aparshakti made a space for himself in Bollywood. And now, the actor is elated to work with legends in ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’. In fact, he made sure he learnt anything and everything he could from the seniors on the set.

“Given the body of work both Pankaj sir and Dimple ma’am have, if they said yes to a project, it means it is special. So, I had to be a part of it. Working on ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’ was all about watching the legends and learning from them,” he said.

Now, Shukla is known as an actor par excellence and Aparshakti couldn’t stop praising how he gave him complete freedom to proceed with his character as a lawyer.

“We often work with directors who are not actors themselves, but they act out and show how they want the scene to be. So, everyone has their own process. If I ever write or direct something, I might have that urge to do it and show how to do it. But Saurabh sir gave us so much freedom and trusted us,” he said.

In ‘Jab Khuli Kitaab’, the director sets out to highlight the perils of a decades-old marriage and the issues of trust within a marriage. Just like Shukla showed ‘trust’ in the actors, Aparshakti believes ‘trust’ is the fulcrum of any relationship.

“Mutual trust is the most important,” said the actor, who was in Ahmedabad for the India-New Zealand T20 final match.