We killed it!’ That, Raghav Juyal tells us, is the gist of the countless messages director Aryan Khan and he have been exchanging since The Ba***ds of Bollywood dropped on Netflix a fortnight ago. “We tell each other, ‘Bhai, yeh toh hona hi tha’. I don’t know about others, but Aryan and I were confident that the show would be well-received,” says Juyal of Khan’s directorial debut.
The Bobby Deol, Mona Singh, Lakshya, and Sahher Bambba-starrer has many things going for it — its tongue-in-cheek humour, sincere performances by the leads, and star-studded cameos. Juyal’s act as Parvaiz, part problem-fixer and part troublemaker, stands out with its hilarity. Yet, he reveals that many advised him against portraying the role after Kill (2023), which saw him as a ruthless antagonist. “Everyone asked me, ‘Why are you playing the hero’s best friend?’ I told them that I would handle it. It’s the actor’s job to make the character his own. I created a lot of things on the spot, [aspects] that weren’t in the script, and Aryan would say, ‘Keep it coming. It’s good.’ When we sat to make a scene, we’d go in so many directions that producers would have to put a stop to it,” he laughs.
(L-R) Raghav Juyal with a friend and Aryan Khan
The duo’s creativity was most evident in the viral sequence with Emraan Hashmi. In the scene, Juyal’s Parvaiz, a Hashmi fan, breaks into the Arabic bit of the star’s popular song, Kaho Na Kaho. The actor, Hashmi’s admirer in real life, grins, “Humara toh school, college, sab usne banaya hai. I did that scene with all my heart. In my first take, I cried. Everyone [on the set] started laughing, wondering why I was crying while singing. But I did that moment with a lot of feelings. Yet, I had to make it look funny.”
On screen, Juyal has a meaty part. But at the script level, things were very different. “My role wasn’t sketched out. Other characters had backstories, mine didn’t. So, I was a little sceptical initially. Then Aryan called me and said, ‘I have full faith in you. We’ll shape the character on set.’ I listened to him, and here we are,” he smiles.
(L-R) Raghav Juyal with Shah Rukh Khan
From the jester to ‘King’?
Raghav Juyal couldn’t have asked for a better follow-up to ‘The Ba***ds of Bollywood’. After Aryan Khan’s directorial debut, the actor is starring in Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘King’. While he doesn’t name the film, Juyal says, “The biggest support has come from Shah Rukh sir; because of this project, he offered me another. That’s a very big thing for me.”