Hansal Mehta, in a recent interview, revealed that he initially wanted to cast Govinda in his 2016 film Aligarh.
Hansal Mehta’s filmography consists of several hard-hitting movies which left a lasting impression on the audience. One of them is his 2016 biographical drama Aligarh starring Manoj Bajpayee and Rajkummar Rao. The social drama inspired by a real-life incident had received rave reviews and many accolades upon its release.
Manoj Bajpayee also walked away with a lot of applauses for his touching performance as Ramchandra Siras, a professor at Aligarh University whose sexual orientation gets revealed through a sting operation. Interestingly, Govinda was Hansal Mehta’s first choice for this role. However, the casting didn’t materialise.
The filmmaker told Lallantop in an interview, “Sometimes when you think of an actor while writing a script, you get stuck on that actor. It has happened to me before when an actor refused to do a project that I had written keeping him in my mind. So, in that case I had to leave the story completely or recalibrate it and make it years later. This happened to me during Aligarh. When I sat with casting director Mukesh Chhabra for Aligarh, I told him, ‘Yaar, let’s talk to Govinda.’ He told me let’s see. I don’t know what happened but that casting didn’t happen. Then Mukesh told me to talk to Manoj Bajpayee.”
Manoj Bajpayee delivered a top-rate performance as Professor Ramchandra Siras and even bagged the Filmfare Best Actor Award (Critics).
Besides Manoj Bajpayee, Aligarh also features Rajkummar Rao, Ashish Vidyarthi and Ishwak Singh in pivotal roles. The film revolves around a gay, linguistic professor who has to deal with the aftermath of a sting operation that puts his sexual orientation in front of the entire nation.
