Category: Interview
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The Irrfan interview
In this 2016 interview, Irrfan Khan talks about Chandrakanta, The Namesake and many a thing before and after… including Naseeruddin Shah’s back.
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The Ayushmann Khurrana interview
(Every year, I do one particularly special interview. Winning over audiences and critics with unusual films Andhadhun and Badhaai Ho, 2018 was the year of Ayushmann Khurana. Here’s my story from last year.) I walk down a clinically white corridor, looking for Room 114. The doors next to me are deceptively nondescript. Names of occupants…
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Nimrat Kaur: The Actress of 2013
My big Irrfan Khan moment came when I reached the cafe a half-hour late and saw Nimrat Kaur sitting by herself, waiting. I did spy her from a distance, but unlike Khan’s character Saajan Fernandez in The Lunchbox, I strode right up to the actress who, unlike her own character in that film, sat with…
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Sonam Kapoor, all shook up
“Do you think Elvis is dead?” Posed with dreamy yet dolorous vagueness, the question comes out of nowhere on the heels of a rather impassioned conversation about books. But then Sonam Kapoor is about nothing if not the non sequitur. Sonam turned 28 a week ago, and she says it was “hysterical.” “It was me…
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Nargis Fakhri: The World Is Not Enough
I couldn’t resist taking an umbrella along. I mean, how often do you get to have a drink with a Nargis, anyway? It’s a name we don’t run into much, despite our legendary screen goddess. The girl sitting across from me, one film old, didn’t particularly dig the name as a kid — “I grew…
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Fernando Alonso and the scarlet dream
I once made a Fernando Alonso voodoo doll. Well, not an Alonso doll per se, but a few of us fanatically pissed Formula One supporters took a tiny F1 car, wrote Renault on it with a felt pen, and called it the Spaniard’s vehicle. Tacks were jammed into tyres, and a magnifying glass may or…
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Why Jenson Button has enough to smile at
2012 was supposed to be a Jenson Button year. No, the ridiculously fast Red Bull cars weren’t suddenly backing off. No, the McLaren hadn’t gotten away with photocopying Ferrari’s notes again. It’s just that this year was all about the tyre, and the whole field looked on the 32-year-old Englishman as being extraordinarily kind to…
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The Salman Khan Interview
You can tell a lot about a megastar by the way he throws his punch. A Hindi film hero might routinely fell over seven with one blow, but each has their own approach. Aamir Khan, all bloodshot eyes and biceps rippling with the fury of thousands of killed wives to avenge, brings both physical intensity…
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An afternoon with Pamela Anderson
Pamela Anderson moves while she talks. And I don’t just mean inadvertently. Excessively animated, she mimes out everything she verbally describes — a cutesy trait when talking of her kids running amuck, and positively debilitating when speaking of dancing, or posing for a centerfold. Gulp. The most pneumatic of icons spent a few days in…
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The Amitabh Bachchan interview
Forty years, and counting… Ten years ago, Amitabh Bachchan was tired. The disgruntled superstar, after seeing his contemporaries over a three decade career wither away into alcoholism and obscurity, was watching himself fall into Hindi cinema’s inevitable age trap. He was too old to stay the leading man, yet that mammoth last name had spent…
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