Actor Shekhar Suman talked about the unpredictable nature of an artist’s career and recalled an anecdote about Amitabh Bachchan. The ‘Heeramandi’ actor narrated a story about Bachchan’s early career told to him by Shashi Kapoor several years ago. Shekhar Suman made his big screen appearance with the film ‘Utsav’, produced by Shashi Kapoor.
Shekhar Suman talks about Amitabh Bachchan’s struggling days
Shekhar said that Amitabh Bachchan didn’t get instant success in the Hindi film industry and experienced a streak of failure at the beginning of his career. He claimed that the actor was completely written off by the industry.
During a chat with Bollywood Hungama, while speaking of his son Adhyayan Suman’s graph in Bollywood, Shekhar said, “I was listening to one of Bachchan saab’s interviews, and he said that for the first few years, 13-14-15 of his films flopped. And directors, without naming him, would refer to him as ‘that constipated actor’.”
“I know it for a fact because Shashi Kapoor told me. He said that there were producers who couldn’t work without him later, but they were the ones who were saying, ‘Oh my God, this constipated looking actor has come again looking for work. Throw him out of the set, who allowed him inside?’. He was rejected for having a bad voice by All India Radio, when he auditioned to be a news reader. How ironic is that? They said he didn’t have a good voice, some people said he’s too tall,” he added.
Shekhar Suman recalls how Amitabh Bachchan was abused
Shekhar went on to recount the “worst” experience Bachchan told about his hardships.
“He said that he came out of a studio and was sitting in his car, his parents were sitting behind him. One guy came and knocked on the window, and he abused in chaste Hindi, and said, ‘Who the f**k asked you to come here? Have you seen your face? Go back to wherever you’ve come from’. Can you imagine?”
On the work front, Shekhar Suman portrays the characters of Nawab Zulfikar in the series ‘Heeramandi’. The period drama is based on the red-light district of Heera Mandi in Lahore (present-day Pakistan) during the pre-partition era.