Mahender Singh Dhoni’s biopic, the blockbuster MS Dhoni: The Untold Story completes four years on Wednesday. Sushant Singh Rajput earned a lot of accolades for the honest portrayal of the cricketer onscreen, which went deeper than perfecting MSD’s signature shots and cricketing stance. The actor died on June 14.
Talking of his preparation, Sushant had said ahead of the film’s release in 2016 and his meetings with Dhoni. “We had three sets of meetings during 12 months of prep. In our first meeting, I just asked him to narrate his story. In the second, I came up with 250 hypothetical multiple-choice questions for him. Since we already have a definition of ourselves in our head, when we answer normal questions, it comes from that. But when you do it on the basis of instinct, it’s a different story. In the third set of meetings, I asked him specific questions about script, things like ‘What were you thinking in that moment?’, just to be sure that I was going in the right direction.
It was Dhoni who had addressed the hundreds of questions he had to answer. On being asked if he was nervous to see his life unfold on screen, Dhoni had said, “Sushant must be feeling more nervous because it was for him to show what he was feeling inside and make the audience believe him, for which he has really scraped me. He used to ask me about how did I feel at that time, how do I feel now. I told him, “yaar tum sawaal he poochhte rehte ho (you keep asking too many questions). In reality, we spent a lot less time together.”
He had also praised Sushant, “The kind of effort he has put in the film because one of the essential part of the film was cricket. Of course, all of us play cricket but when you have to show it on screen, you have to learn certain things, especially cricket shots. He has hit the helicopter shot in the movie and it’s exactly like a replica. So Sushant has put a lot of effort.”
