Ram Gopal Varma on whether Irrfan Khan was in the running for Daud

By: Mohnish Singh

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has delivered some memorable films in his career. The 1997 film Daud remains one of his most notable works to date. Though Sanjay Dutt and Urmila Matondkar-starrer did not set the cash registers jingling upon its theatrical release in 1997, it did manage to receive great love from audiences after several telecasts on television.

Recently, a video surfaced on social media wherein award-winning actor Manoj Bajpayee revealed that late actor Irrfan Khan and Vineet Kumar were also being considered for the role of Paresh Rawal's henchmen in the film. The role eventually landed in his lap.

However, Varma has now clarified that he never considered Irrfan Khan for the said role. The maverick filmmaker took to Twitter and wrote, “Just to set the record straight, I was meeting quite a few actors at that time and Manoj caught my eye because of Bandit Queen (1994). I never registered Irrfan and I consciously remembered seeing him only much later when he came to the set of some other shoot.”

Verma also told a publication that he regrets not doing any film with Irrfan Khan. “We were introduced long after Daud. We never worked together. I don’t know why! It’s just one of those things that never happened. I regret it now. We would have created special magic together. I think he was an actor who could anything,” he said.

Irrfan Khan, whose filmography boasts of several commercially and critically successful films like Maqbool (2003), Namesake (2006), Paan Singh Tomar (2010), Life of Pie (2012), The Lunchbox (2013), Piku (2015), Talwar (2015), and Hindi Medium (2017), passed away on April 29, 2020. The actor died of a colon infection.

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