Varun Dhawan was keen on Anurag Kashyap launching him in films

Varun Dhawan on Sunday said that there was a time when he was leaning towards gritty cinema and would have done anything in his power to be launched by Anurag Kashyap. The star was speaking at an in-conversation session ‘Dha-One,’ moderated by writer Rumi Jaffery, with his father, filmmaker David Dhawan, at the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa.

Director Sriram Raghavan and IFFI Indian Panorama chairperson Rahul Rawail were part of the audience. “Initially my leaning was always towards the left side. I had loved ‘Black Friday’, Sriram’s films… I was leaning over there. I would have probably given my right hand at that time to be launched by Anurag Kashyap. Honestly,” Varun said. David said, “Thank God” reports Mid Day. 

Varun said when he told his father that he was doing ‘Badlapur’ (2015), the veteran filmmaker received the news negatively. David added, “I saw he had grown a beard for the character, he didn’t used to laugh, he didn’t use to talk for 20 days. So I asked my wife ‘when will he cut his beard?’ I didn’t know what he was doing. But thought, ‘chalo, achhi hee banegi’. “I saw the film. Sriram showed me twice and I loved the film. I said ‘it’s a revenge story, it’s a Hindustani (Indian) film’.”

Varun also revealed he had visited a psychiatrist for a couple of sessions after working on the emotionally disturbing ‘Badlapur.’ When the revelation was met by both horror and laughs from the audience, the star gave a nod to mental health awareness. He said, “There’s nothing wrong in that, to speak your mind. Whatever that’s inside you, it just gets balanced. They didn’t say that ‘there’s something’… don’t get scared. Nothing went wrong with me. But the doctor said, ‘If you’ll stay in an intense environment for a long time, so it will happen.”