CASTING A SPELL

How Mukesh Chhabra works his magic on screen by picking the right actors for the right role

- POOJA BIRAIA JAISWAL

How do you make the casting czar of Bollywood ecstatic in a moment and jittery in the next? First, offer him Jawan (2023), and then slip in that it will be helmed by Atlee, who is best known for his Tamil hits.

When Mukesh Chhabra was asked to consult Atlee, he got nervous. Not because he had to cast more than 150 people, but more because the relationship between casting directors and filmmakers is quite delicate. And, it is in the initial meetings that one figures out whether the pairing will work. Also, down south, there are no casting directors; the filmmakers do the casting. “But Atlee understood the strength of a casting director,” says Chhabra, “and the other advantage for me was that Bollywood was very new to Atlee.” It took him almost a month to understand Atlee. “When you are working with a director like Atlee who is not from here, especially when he has never done a Hindi film, it takes a while to just come around to his way of thinking,” he explains. “I figured that to crack this commercial film, we have to fill it up with a great ensemble cast, with new and established faces. I had earlier worked on big films like PK (2014), Sanju (2018), Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015)... this was very different in terms of scale and imagination. I had eight assistants on this film, and each focused on managing groups of ten actors.”

Chhabra was impressed by Atlee’s ability to gauge an actor from his or her photograph. “Somehow, he never saw an audition,” he says. “He would simply see the face and know whether this person could act or not. That’s how we found Aaliyah Qureishi, Sanjeeta (Bhattacharya), Lehar (Khan) and Riddhi Dogra.” And, it paid off—Jawan became the second-highest grossing Bollywood film.