Sidharth Malhotra & Jacqueline Fernandez tell SANGEETA YADAV in a free-wheeling conversation that they are the modern cool people who love to work and have fun
Despite coming on the screen for the first time together in A Gentleman, they call themselves Bollywood’s conventional pair. If the chemistry between the two is the barometer, they do sizzle big way.
To a large extent the credit for this racy-pacy movie goes to the pairing of Sidharth Malhotra and Jacqueline Fernandez. While Fernandez shows off her oomph with élan, Malhotra looks and performs the action scenes amazingly.
“I am a director's actor and working with Raj and DK was a great learning experience. Their cinema is very different from the kind of cinema I have been worked in till now. Working on this character took me away from the usual roles I have played thus far. I surrendered to do what my directors wanted for the character. I went with the gut feeling and did it their way. So it was a very different kind of performance for me,” Fernandez says.
For Malhotra, donning a double role and doing comedy for the first time meant coming out of his comfort zone. “The straight face comedy and the double role angles are very fresh for me. The kind of cool slick action this film pans on is different from the intense, heavy and emotional action scenes that I have done in the past. You will see a lot many shades of me in the film through my double role,” he tells you.
From sliding down a 60-storey building in Miami, the bike chase in Thailand, to hand combat, Malhotra trained himself for months for the final take. “All the credit for my action scenes goes to French action choreographer Cyril Raffaelli. We trained for two months before the final shoot. A lot of brainstorming has gone into making me action ready like getting the right body language and style of an action hero, to deciding what kind of action will look good on me and will I be able to do justice to it or not. He has done a fabulous job,” Malhotra says.
Where there is action, injuries are common. Malhotra too got injured while shooting for a scene. Despite being injured, he swung back to action immediately. “When we were shooting for a bike chase in Thailand, to stop the bike, I had to put my foot down and I twisted my knee and got a lot of cuts and bruises on my hand. We could only take a half-an-hour break as we had limited hours to shoot outdoors. I put a crape bandaid on my knee and went back on the bike for the remaining shoot. Pain is temporary but films are forever. Eventually, all the hard work pays,” he says.
Malhotra recalls another incident while shooting for a song in Miami. “Apart from me and Jacqueline romancing on the boat for the most romantic song of the film Baat Bann Jaaye, other female dancers were supposed to be there too. We took them on the boat and went into the deep sea. All of them had sea sickness. So we had to shoot without them. That was our first attempt at romancing each other for the film where behind the camera sick dancers were throwing up,” he tells you with a laugh.
Having worked in films like Student of the Year, Hasee Toh Phasee, Ek Villain, Brothers, Kapoor & Sons and Baar Baar Dekho, Malhotra feels that with every film he has gradually improved.
“Baar Baar Dekho did not do well. last year was like an equaliser. I slowed down, worked on the craft and looked for the opportunities to do a variety of characters. I feel I am gradually improving, growing and learning to getting emotions right. I will never be the same as my previous movies. In the next three-four films, I can assure you as far as my performance is concerned, there will be a different shade to it. It is not very difficult right now because we are just starting off. If you see senior actors who have been here for over a decade, for them it might be challenging after going through a generation of fans. I feel we belong to the present generation and our best is far away and yet to come,” he says.
For Fernandez, career progression is like an open book. “I actually leave my career progression to an open book that just gets written along the way because you never know what will happen and what role might be offered to you next. It is
unpredictable and that’s what I love about it. I don’t want to put pressure on myself by trying to fit in a mould or listen to what people say. That is not the way I look at my life and work. I just want to be happy and content about what I do and what I get. I want to make the most of those opportunities,” Fernandez tells you.