The trailer of Bob Biswas is out and it surely seems like another promising performance from Abhishek Bachchan. The actor, who has given many acclaimed performances in the last year with Breathe 2: Into the Shadows, Ludo and The Big Bull, is now ready to slip into the character of a contract killer, originating from the story of Vidya Balan’s 2012 film, Kahaani, initially played by Saswata Chatterjee.
To play the part, AB had to put on some weight to gain those chubby cheeks and a paunch as seen in the trailer. While the actor admitted that binge eating Kolkata’s delicacies was a fun affair, maintaining that weight, wasn’t.
Speaking to a leading news daily, Abhishek opened up on the weight gain for the film and the challenges that he had to face while filming. As a small percent of film got stalled due to nationwide lockdown back in 2020, the actor got mentally stuck trying to maintain the gained weight. “I mean to put on the weight obviously shooting in Kolkata in winter when you can have Gud Sandesh and all the wonderful sweet food that Kolkata has, but mentally I got stuck because we had to shut down our shoot halfway through because of the lockdown and we were about 80 per cent complete. And, we had another 10-15 days of work left. Throughout the lockdown, I had to maintain that weight. That was tough.”
Abhishek also tried his hand with the prosthetics as suggested by director Diya Ghosh and her father Sujoy Ghosh but later decided against it as it did not have an authentic feel. “I became between 100-105 kilos during the shoot. And if you see Bob’s face, the face changes when it is round and his cheeks fill up. When you do prosthetics on the cheeks it looks like a prosthetic. So, the stomach moves in a different way. When you have that weight and you are physically carrying that weight your entire performance changes because your body language changes your weight, your movement, your walk, your run, everything changes."
Now, that’s quite a commitment on Abhishek’s part. Produced by Red Chillies Entertainment, Bob Biswas also features Chitrangada Singh, Paran Bandopadhyay, and Tina Desai, among others. It releases on December 3 on ZEE5.
(Source- India Today)
