Mahima Chaudhry, in a recent interview, walked down the memory lane and shared her fond memories of working with Shah Rukh Khan in Pardes.
What’s common between Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Anushka Sharma and Deepika Padukone? They all made their acting debut in Bollywood opposite Shah Rukh Khan! One more name in that list is of Mahima Chaudhry. The actress stepped into the film industry with Subhash Ghai’s Pardes (1997) in which she was paired with Shah Rukh Khan and Apurva Agnihotri.
Recently in an interview with Radio Nasha, Mahima revisited her days on ‘Pardes’ sets and recalled how King Khan became the focus of attention when he made his first appearance on the sets after 20 days.
Mahima reminisced, “During the initial 15-20 days of Pardes, everyone kept saying he would arrive today or tomorrow, but he didn’t show up. When he finally did, everyone huddled around him, because we were all new, and waited for him to say, ‘Hi’. Once he started a conversation, everyone would listen. He is full of stories.”
Further, the actress also shared how she would carefully watch the superstar during his scenes to learn from him.
“I would sit and watch his takes to see how he does the scenes, says his lines, performs the dance steps etc to watch and learn,” she told the interviewer.
Previously, in one of her interviews, Mahima had called Pardes a debut better that what she had dreamt of, and added, “There’s something called luck that plays an important part because it’s not like I was the most talented. There were so many people who were more talented than me.”
Interestingly, Mahima Chaudhry was not the first choice for Pardes. Director Subhash Ghai, in one of his interviews, mentioned that he had initially approached Madhuri Dixit for the role of Ganga. The ‘dhak dhak’ girl had even liked the story. However, things didn’t work out as expected, and the makers ended up casting Mahima Chaudhry.
