Breaking up Is Hard to Do

From Kill Dil to Killjoy • Lucky Displacement

Hrithik Roshan, who separated from his wife Sussanne earlier this year, appears to be finally getting comfortable acknowledging and talking about his single status in the media. During a television interview I did with Hrithik and his Bang Bang! co-star Katrina Kaif last week, the actor admitted with a wry grin that he hadn’t ever used a pick-up line before, but added cheekily that “I need to”. Posing on the cover of Stardust magazine’s latest issue, he’s been quoted as saying, “I’m single… It’s a good life.”

The actor’s inner circle reveals that it wasn’t easy for Hrithik to get here. Reportedly, he took the break-up very badly initially, “and made every effort to broach a reconciliation with Sussanne before finally accepting that it wasn’t going to happen”. He wasn’t comfortable with the fact that the tabloids were following the story closely, and even less equipped to deal with questions about the break-up. During an interview to promote his film Krrish 3 last year, he famously flew into a rage when a TV reporter in Singapore asked him to comment on rumours that his marriage was in trouble. “Today he can handle questions because he’s come to terms with the split,” a source close to Hrithik explains.

Sussanne, meanwhile, is said to have moved into a fancy apartment in Versova with her two sons, and has apparently retired from public life. According to a friend of hers, “She’s slowly cutting off her connections with people in the film industry because she finds that relationships here are completely fake.”

Focused on raising her sons while continuing with her interiors venture The Charcoal Project, Sussanne apparently doesn’t accept invitations to attend parties thrown by her former filmi friends. “She’s in a good place, but it isn’t easy,” her friend reveals.

From Kill Dil to Killjoy

Parineeti Chopra has a hole the size of a football field in her date diary. The actress, coming off the dud that was Daawat-e-Ishq, will next get busy promoting Shaad Ali’s Kill Dil, which releases in November. But she does not have any film lined up right after.

It wasn’t meant to be this way, of course. She’d signed Dinesh Vijan’s love story opposite Saif Ali Khan, but the actor—following his split with Dinesh, his friend and former producing partner—recently left the project, throwing Parineeti’s plans up in the air.

She’s been wanting to make a movie with Saif for a while now, she’d said, and was thrilled when Dinesh offered her his film. But now she’s reportedly miffed that Saif didn’t so much as make a call to her to inform her of his decision. Instead, she had to find out from the press that the movie wasn’t happening anymore after Saif had walked out of it.

Lucky Displacement

Turns out that one of the year’s biggest hits, a bona fide blockbuster that was praised for its music and its performances in particular, might have been a very different film if the makers had gone ahead with their original casting plans. Apparently the producer had cast a second generation filmi kid to play the central protagonist, but then replaced him with another youngster on the recommendation (and insistence, reportedly) of the producer’s close friend and a leading producer in his own right.

An influential insider within the studio that produced the film reveals that it was embarrassing and awkward to drop the actor (who was their original choice) after he’d been signed for the film, “for no fault of his”, but that “things turned out for the best in the end” when the film opened wondrously at the box office.

The source explains that the film’s hot-shot director wasn’t convinced about the last-minute casting change either, “but our hands were tied”. The replacement, after all, was an unproven actor and one who came with the baggage of being a former model. “But we got very lucky. And to be fair, he worked very hard to make sure that he wasn’t going to be dismissed as just another pretty face.”

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Rajeev Masand

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