Abhishek Bachchan‘s next is the Zee5 crime thriller ‘Bob Biswas’ which releases on December 3, 2021.
It is a spin-off of the iconic character Bob Biswas from Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani. Sujoy’s daughter Diya Annapurna Ghosh has directed this project.
For this film, Abhishek had to go through a major transformation and it’s one like none other. The actor had to gain an enormous amount of weight for the film and in an interview, he spoke about his experience.
Talking about why he preferred to gain weight over prosthetic makeup he says, “When you put a prosthetic stomach, it is very inanimate. And you look fake somewhere. I believe today the audience wants to see an actor being completely authentic with the material that they have. They want to see the actor really jump in with both two feet and to really go for it. And they are very quick to point out when they do something like this.”
He then explained why he gained about 100 – 105 KILOS! “I became between 100-105 kilos during the shoot. And if you see Bob’s face, the face changes when it is round and his cheeks fill up. Weight pulls you down a bit. So, I wanted that slight hunch. I wanted that in the walk. For me, I feel if I can look the character, I feel 50% of my performance is taken care of. That’s what we did.”
“Throughout the lockdown, I had to maintain that weight. That was tough. Because it is not nice to be overweight like that. It is very cumbersome, and I am not even getting into the effects it has on your health which it does, but it is difficult to carry that kind of weight around you. You have to do what you have to do for your work and your film. We managed to pull it off and finish the film and started the arduous process of losing it for my next project, which I was shooting soon after,” he continues.
Lastly, he explained his wife Aishwarya Rai and daughter Aaradhya’s reactions to his weight gain. “They understand that it is part of the profession and they know it is second nature to all of us at home as actors. So, everybody is very used to this process.”
