When a producer refused to put up Akshay Kumar’s hoardings during his flop phase, said ‘Tumhari aukaat nahi hai’
Actor Akshay Kumar is currently going through a particularly rough patch, with back-to-back box office flops this year. But this isn’t the first time that the actor has experienced career setbacks. In the mid-90s, Akshay appeared in over half-a-dozen flops in a row, chipping at his bankability in the film industry, and making producer second guess how much they should invest in him.
Producer Suneel Darshan, in a new interview with RJ Siddharth Kannan, recalled how Akshay ‘wooed’ him for work during that phase, and won him over. Suneel remembered how a dejected Akshay told him that the producer of his most recent film hadn’t even bothered to put up billboards of the film, because they thought of him as a liability.
He said, “Just two months before Jaanwar was going to release, Akshay walked in and he said, ‘Suneel ji, I’m going through so much problems. The producer of the movie which released on Friday hasn’t put up posters of the movie, and there’s not even a single hoarding’.” When Suneel asked Akshay what the producer told him, Akshay said that he was told, “Tumhari aukaat nahi hai ke tumhari film ke hoarding aur poster lag sake (You’re not at the status where your films can have posters and hoardings).”
Suneel said that he felt ‘so bad’ for Akshay, and believed that his morale had been crushed. So, he decided to invest in a large billboard for their film Jaanwar, with a special mandate for the people behind the billboards. “I said do one thing, don’t put the two heroines, only put Akshay Kumar. So, what people would view as a liability to a project, I was seriously treating him as an asset.”
Jaanwar became a hit, and Akshay bounced back. The experienced phenomenal success in the 2000s and 2010s. But his last three theatrical releases — Bachchhan Paandey, Samrat Prithviraj and Raksha Bandhan — have all tanked badly. At a recent press event, the actor admitted that he’s introspecting about his career.
