Actor Jimmy Shergill, who is currently seen in Ranneeti: Balakot & Beyond, has talked about his first meeting with Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan at late filmmaker Yash Chopra’s house in Mumbai. Jimmy revealed that he was the last person to come on board the 2000 hit musical romance drama, Mohabbatein. The rest of the cast was locked months before Jimmy was finalised for the role of Karan Choudhry.

In a conversation with Sushant Sinha, Jimmy recalled “These guys were training for six months, Uday (Uday Chopra), Jugal (Jugal Hansraj) and all the three girls Shamita Shetty, Preeti Jhangiani and Kim Sharma. They were not able to finalise that one boy and maybe the role was written in my destiny. When the role came to me, I was six months behind these people. And then for the next three months the training went on.”

He continued, “When everything was finalised, a havan was organised at Yash uncle’s house. I remember that I had fallen somewhere and my hand was injured and I had 55 stitches. I was under pressure that now I will not be able to do any training. Adi (filmmaker Aditya Chopra) introduced me to Amitabh Bachchan and said ‘he is playing Karan.’ He looked at me and said ‘you are doing amazing method acting. Abhi se haath katwaane lag gaye.’ For a second I couldn’t understand what was happening.”

Jimmy then revealed that Amitabh was actually referring to the scenes in Mohabbatein, where his character Karan would often hurt his hand to get it bandaged by Preeti Jhangiani’s character. He was all praise for Amitabh’s sense of humour and said “it came without even thinking for a flash of a second.”

Mohabbatein also starred Shah Rukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. It became a huge success at the box office.

In the same interview, Jimmy opened up about how he landed his debut film ‘Maachis’. He said that after completing his film studies in Bombay, he didn’t want to go back home, so when he heard about the movie Maachis through his mutual contacts, he met Gulzar and requested him to keep him as an assistant director on the film.

“If you do acting, why do you want to come into direction?” Gulzar asked Jimmy. To which, Jimmy replied, “I have heard that here nobody gets a break until after five or six years and I don’t want to go home.”

Gulzar then told Jimmy to read the script of the film. When the veteran writer-filmmaker asked Jimmy about which role he liked, the actor said, “‘I think I should do Jimmy. My pet name is Jimmy.’ I met him as Jasjit Shergill.”

The actor added, “I had to listen to a lot of taunts. A lot of people said things like ‘Are you mad? This is a small role. Wait for your time to come.’” Talking about his fees for the film, Jimmy said, “I think it was somewhere around Rs 20,000. I was lucky that my family was supporting me. This went on till I got Mohabbatein. Once Mohabbatein came, I slowly reduced taking money from home.”