Dil Chahta Hai marked a turning point in everyone’s careers who was associated with the film. But Farhan Akhtar’s directorial debut didn’t have an easy casting process. Before casting the trio, Akhtar met a bunch of actors who had all rejected the roles. But once he met Akshaye Khanna, who gave a nod to the project, there was hope for the film. But when Aamir Khan was approached for the movie, he had two conditions to take up the film, as revealed by Farhan Akhtar at the recently concluded Waves Summit.
“I never thought Aamir would say yes so I never went to him. It sounds frivolous and kind of patronising now, forgive me because that’s not my intention, but I went to him eventually because I had no choice. And I went with the feeling that he is going to say no but since I haven’t met him, let me go and meet him,” Farhan shared.
Once he narrated the film to Aamir, the superstar agreed to do the film, but he had two conditions.
“He said I will do this film but I have some conditions. So the dialogues were in English at that time so he said that you get the dialogue draft in Hindi because right now, you have written it in English. I want to know if this humour will work in Hindi. He said if I like the Hindi draft, I don’t want to play Sid, I want to play Aakash,” he shared.
In case you didn’t know, Aamir Khan was first approached for Sid’s role, which was eventually played by Akshaye. But Aamir wanted to play Aakash. The rest is history!
After this meeting, Farhan also redid the film’s draft in Hindi and rewrote the part for Aamir. But his next challenge was how to communicate this to Akshaye who had agreed to play Aakash. Here’s what happened next.
“I met Akshaye and I told him ‘Aamir is really keen to do the film but he wants to do Aakash’. Akshaye said ‘you came and met me and told me you want me to be Aakash. If you tell me you want me to be Sid, I don’t care. I will do any role but I want to be in this movie,” Farhan shared, adding, “I am always indebted to him for being so gracious.”