Vikramaditya Motwane on Jubilee: My casting director did not tell me he was auditioning Aparshakti Khurana

Vikramaditya Motwane, along with Aparshakti Khurana and Sidhant Gupta, was in town to attend a success party of Jubilee hosted by Prosenjit Chatterjee. In a chat with OTTplay, the director talked about the casting, his vision, and the reception on the Amazon Prime show. 

Talking about casting Aparshakti for the character of Vinod Das, aka Madan Kumar, Vikramaditya said that the actor’s casting ‘ironically’ bears similarities with the on-screen character of Madan Kumar. “Apar (Aparshakti) was auditioned and my casting director sent me the audition without warning. He did not tell me that he was auditioning Apar. I might have said no. I would probably have said, ‘But he is a comedy actor’. I think Anmol – my casting director – saw something in him. It was a very good audition. Ironically, it is the same thing as the show. So his unexpected audition came to me and becomes a part of the show. It is a meta moment actually,” said the director.  

What was his brief to the actors? Vikramaditya revealed that he made no watchlist of old films for his actors. “I did not make any of the actors watch any old movies or anything. We are creating characters. We are going to write dialogues. Now you play the character. Get your language right. Don’t copy anyone. That’s why they are authentic. Jay Khanna is Jay Khanna and Madan Kumar is Madan Kumar. In the era of the ’40s and ’50s, you only had new stars and they had their style. You can refer back to only a certain bunch of people. There was nostalgia, yes, but no copy. Throughout the filmmaking process, I just made my cinematographer watch a few black-and-white photos for the lighting patterns, etc. We did not do it like, ‘Oh let’s shoot a ’50s film’,” he said. 

However, Jubilee makes clear references to several characters from the ’40s and ’50s. Vikramaditya explained, “The reference of Himangshu Rai and Devika Rani is more about an incident in their life that for us has become an urban legend. We always heard about it. Whether it is true, if it happened or not happened nobody knows. So you are taking an urban legend that has been coming down for 70 years. It was like we all have heard the gossip from that time. We have taken it from there. We started from there and spun it off into this saga. We are paying a tribute – a homage to that entire film generation. So from the perspective of Jay Khanna, the homage is paid to Dev Ananda and also to Raj Kapoor and Dilip Kumar.” 

The director also said that Jubilee is also an expression of love for Mumbai – the city where he grew up. “Bombay became a character because we all grew up in Bombay. It is my city and my home. There was a tribute paid to the architectural, art-deco approach. VT in the background and so on. That's just the love for the city,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Vikramaditya is floored with the response Jubilee got from its audience. “The passion with which people are watching the show and responding to it says that it is not a quantitative thing but a qualitative thing. I did not expect that kind of response. We all thought that we are trying to make a good show and people will like it. But the way they are showing passion for the show is very heartwarming. We are loving it. I am glad. We wanted to make the show with characters based on history and we thought people will get it. We thought they might just stop and figure it and they are doing it,” said the director.