Anurag Kashyap recently made headlines where he expressed guilt over his public statement about his Dev.D actor Abhay Deol and privately about the late Sushant Singh Rajput. In an interview, Anurag accused Abhay of being difficult to work with, claiming that the actor insisted on staying in a five-star hotel separate from the rest of the cast and crew. Abhay had denied this.
Anurag had revealed shortly after Sushant’s death that he had refused to speak with him about a project because he was resentful of being ghosted by the actor in the past. The filmmaker discussed his differences with Abhay and Sushant in a new interview with Showsha. He said, “It’s taken me a year-and-a-half of sickness to realise a lot of things. I was so reactive; I would say things. I would say things out of anger, out of reaction, to things I felt perturbed by. It took me time to realise that I’m shouting, I’m shouting in a room full of people shouting. Nobody’s listening to each other, not just to me. That’s what social media has become. And I stepped back. I said, ‘Why am I reacting to this? What is bothering me?’”
He further added, “A lot has changed, but I know I have no filter. But it’s also made me realise I don’t need to say everything… For example, that whole spat between me and Abhay. Somebody was doing an article about why a very good actor like Abhay is no longer in the movies, and I spoke about my experiences, something that happened 13 years ago. I didn’t need to say it publicly. And the day the unfortunate incident happened of SSR, I felt so bad. Three weeks prior to that somebody was trying to reach out because he wanted to talk, and I was like, ‘No, he ghosted me, I don’t want to talk’. You get pangs of guilt. So, I tried to reach out to Abhay and I apologised to him, because somebody had told me that he was upset about me speaking publicly about him.”
Anurag stated that he told Abhay that it was fine to yell at him and then apologised repeatedly for what he said. However, Abhay appeared to be upset about what Anurag had said about him as recently as last month. Abhay called the filmmaker a “liar” and a “toxic” person in an interview with mid-day. Anurag acknowledged that they had both changed and expressed regret for what he had said.
Anurag had stated in a 2020 interview with NDTV that he was disappointed that Sushant had backed out of projects with him in favour of more high-profile jobs. He stated, “YRF called him and said, ‘We’ll give you a deal. You do Shuddh Desi Romance.’ Sushant, who used to sit in my office with Mukesh and all of us used to sit together, signed up with YRF and dropped Hasee Toh Phasee, a film of an outsider because usko validation YRF ka chahiye tha (he wanted validation from YRF). It’s with every actor, so I am not holding any grudges… Years later, in 2016, before the release of MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, Mukesh went to Sushant and said, ‘Anurag has written a script looking for an actor who can play someone based out of Uttar Pradesh.’ Dhoni released, became a success and he never called me back. I was not upset, I moved on, I did Mukkabaaz.”
