Shreyas Talpade was told to cancel his wedding because ‘Iqbal couldn’t be married’, had to keep it ‘under wraps’

Actor Shreyas Talpade recalled that director Nagesh Kukonoor was ‘livid’ when he learned that Shreyas was on the verge of getting married. The duo worked together on the National Award-winning film, Iqbal.

The actor was supposed to begin filming Iqbal in three days when he asked the director for a holiday on December 31. Nagesh assumed that he wanted to party, but when Shreyas told him that he was going to get married on that day, Nagesh told him to ‘cancel’ the wedding.

Shreyas told a leading daily in an interview, “Here I was, a middle-class guy whose wedding cards had gone out, being told to cancel it; I didn’t know what to do. It was after a lot of convincing, and assuring him that I would keep the wedding under wraps, that he let me have a day off.”

Nagesh’s reasoning was that Iqbal, who was supposed to be a teenager in the film, couldn’t be married man in real life. Shreyas said that he never spoke about his marriage during the film’s publicity tour, and when his wife Deepti said that she wanted to attend the film’s premiere, she came as Nagesh’s sister.

Even producer Subhash Ghai wasn’t aware of Shreyas’ marital status. “When Subhash ji saw her one too many times at screenings and enquired, Nagesh told him who I really was. He refused to believe I was married. To him, I was an 18-year-old boy who had had a child marriage and was not even feeding his wife, making her faint.” he said.

Also read: Shreyas Talpade: For long things have not been fair in Bollywood, it was pretty one sided

Iqbal featured Girish Karnad and Naseeruddin Shah, who also won a National Award for his performance.