Amole Gupte reveals real reason behind Shraddha kapoor exiting Saina Nehwal’s biopic

Last updated on March 25th, 2021 at 09:17 am

Soon after the release of the trailer of ace badminton player Saina Nehwal’s biopic, people were impressed by Parineeti Chopra’s performance and the uncanny similarities between the two playing shots. But did you know that Chopra was not the first choice to play Saina Nehwal in Amole Gupte’s movie?

It was Shraddha Kapoor who was first approached for the character and she also began preparing for it. Initial few scenes were also shot and the director was really happy with the results. But later on Kapoor has a few health issues, dengue being one of them, because of which the shooting was getting delayed. It is then that Gupte decided to change the lead actor. 

Parineeti took over Nehwal’s character in 2019 and since then a lot of stills and scenes have been released by the actor herself of her preparing for the role. Gupte talked about the replacement to PTI saying, “Initially we had Shraddha in the film, who was completely prepared for the role, which is why we started shooting. But then she fell ill, she got dengue which took the wind out of her.”

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He stressed that because of the project being a sports-driven film, the actor was required to act out physically draining scenes and keep standing on the badminton court for long hours, which was even more difficult due to Shraddha’s poor health. Kapoor hence left the movie and joined the cast of ‘Chhichhore’, which was shot at IIT Bombay. 

This was the same time when Bhushan Kumar produced ‘Street Dancer’ was facing some crisis after Katrina Kaif left the movie mid-way. Initially, Varun Dhawan and Katrina Kaif were signed for the project directed by Remo D’Souza but Kaif left the movie for allegedly a role in Salman Khan’s movie Bharat. 

Bhushan was looking for a replacement after the sudden exit, said Gupte and added that Shraddha came into the picture. After that, Parineeti too was finalised for Saina’s role and all was well after that. 

Amole Gupte is making a comeback as a director after a four years gap with ‘Saina’. His last project was a feature film called ‘Sniff’. Even though people assumed that making such a huge change from Shraddha to Parineeti, the film will get affected and bring a little disturbance in the unit but for Gupte, it was not something that concerned him. 

Gupte said that he is not concerned over such things. According to the celebrated director, Bhushan’s help did wonders for him as he explained not every producer will do what Bhushan did. He noted that for producers, it is about money so they will ask to leave the project as already enough has been spent on it but it was not the case with Bhusan. 

Talking about the movie and Chopra stepping into the shoes of Saina, Gupe said, “An actor will naturally have limited time to work on. The idea was that it should be accepted as good badminton and she delivered that.”

The film also stars Meghna malik and Manav Kaul and is set to be released on March 26.