'Will Come Naked...': Nana Patekar Begged Amol Palekar After Rejection For Hitting A Director
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Nana Patekar's off-screen reputation nearly closed doors with Amol Palekar after a rumoured altercation with Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
Long before Nana Patekar became known for his intense screen presence, his off-screen reputation nearly closed doors for him. In the late 1980s, fresh off the success of Parinda, Nana found himself in a difficult spot and not because of his acting chops, but because of what happened behind the scenes. Rumours of a physical altercation with Parinda director Vidhu Vinod Chopra had spread, and that image stuck.
So when Amol Palekar was casting for Thodasa Roomani Ho Jayen in 1990, he didn't see Nana fitting into the gentle, poetic role at the heart of his film.
'I didn't reject him because of his short temper," Amol said in an interview with The Lallantop. 'That character was far away from being a short temper guy, in fact, that character had a poetic heart, he was very soft. I told Nana, 'You don't have softness in your whole personality and you won't be able to do it.'"
But Nana wasn't one to give up easily. Rather than reacting with more heat, he approached Amol with humility and persistence. 'He kept pursuing me," Palekar recalled. 'This was the time when Parinda was a hit and his gritty character in the film was a hit, he was seen as the angry young man. At that time, people were also talking about how Nana beat up Vidhu Vinod Chopra during Parinda shoot. There was physical fight between them."
Despite the noise around him, Nana showed he was willing to strip himself of that aggressive image to prove his range as an actor. Amol added, 'So, it is obvious that he didn't come close to my character. But he took it as a challenge and came to me for 10 days and did rehearsals with me. He told me, 'I will come to you naked, you shape me how you want.' During those 10 days of rehearsals he changed completely, his personality changed completely. And during the whole shoot we didn't even have an argument, forget about getting into a fight."
Vidhu Vinod Chopra once opened up about a heated confrontation with Nana Patekar during the making of Parinda. Speaking on the reality show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa, the filmmaker recalled how a disagreement on set unexpectedly spiralled into a physical altercation.
He had shared, 'There's a scene in the film where Nana asks if he has tears in his eyes after his wife has died… We'd been shooting all day, and it was late in the evening. Nana declared that he was too tired to continue and that he was going home. I told him, 'Sure, you pay for the overheads then'. He started swearing at me, I swore back, and in the scuffle, I tore his kurta. The cops on set said, 'We're here to protect you, and you're fighting among yourselves.'"
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