Nikkhil Advani, the director of Kal Ho Naa Ho, recalled how his film’s lead star Shah Rukh Khan wanted to opt out because of a back injury.
Whenever someone mentions the 2003 film Kal Ho Naa Ho, it immediately gives us a flashback of Shah Rukh Khan’s iconic performance as Aman Mathur! But do you know that there was a time when the Bollywood superstar wanted the makers of the film to replace him with another actor?
Well, this revelation was made by none other than the film’s director Nikkhil Advani in his recent interview with Mirchi. The filmmaker revealed that Shah Rukh Khan wanted to quit Kal Ho Naa Ho after shooting for four days because of his back injury. He even suggested them to replace him with Salman Khan.
Nikkhil recalled, “He didn’t want to do the film. After shooting for four days, he told me and Karan that he couldn’t continue. He had a back injury. He’d done a stunt for Duplicate, and hadn’t looked after it since then. It had become very bad. He called up Karan and he said, ‘I can’t go on.’ After doing one scene, he said, ‘I can’t do it, I’ll call Salman up, you make it with him’.”
He added that Shah Rukh Khan was serious about his decision. He was planning to go to Germany for surgery, and didn’t want producer Karan Johar and Nikkhil to delay the film on his account.
“He said, ‘I’m going for surgery to Germany, and it’ll take me six months to recover. You won’t wait, of course’. We said we’ll wait,” the director said in his interview.
In the same chat, Nikkhil said they initially started shooting in Toronto, but he became ‘depressed’ because he wanted to shoot in New York, as had been written in the script by Karan. They relocated to New York after a few months when he complained about it to Yash Johar.
On being asked why he never worked with Shah Rukh Khan again post Kal Ho Naa Ho, the director revealed, “I have a 100% hit record with Shah Rukh Khan, I don’t want to ruin it! I’m terrified of making something that doesn’t live up to expectations.”
Meanwhile, Kal Ho Naa Ho recently received a tremendous response upon its re-release in cinema halls.
Reacting to it, Nikkhil said that a good film will always attract audiences, and even joked how somebody told him that the re-release had done better commercially than his last film, Vedaa.
Kal Ho Naa Ho featured Shah Rukh Khan, Preity Zinta and Saif Ali Khan in leading roles.
