Varun Dhawan: I would be game for a roast

Sneha Mahadevan

31 January

Varun Dhawan has been off the radar for a while what with preparing for his role in his next, Shriram Raghavan's Badlapur. After being part of commercially viable safe hero projects, Varun decided to venture into this dark space as the film is an intense real life revenge drama. Obviously, this role was a complete eye-opener for him and took a huge toll on the actor. So much so that he needed to seek help to get out of this zone he had to be in. "It took a big toll on me. It was humungous. Somewhere, I wasn't prepared for it because I didn't know it would be this hard. I was probably immature to go into the film as I wasn't prepared to do the things that the film required me to. It shook me up quite badly. I stayed in Igatpuri for 30 days without TV, electricity and any contact with anyone, just living the character. These things did affect me and when I came back, I decided to talk to people and seek help. My mother was very worried for me but I had told her beforehand that I might not be fine for a while and she did understand. I had a lot of fights with my friends during that particular period as well because no one really understood me and what I was going through," says Varun. While eventually, he did come out of the shell, he decided to talk about battling this because he didn't want to set a wrong example to his young fans. "I realised something about the human psyche. I realised that we were only telling the youth about one side of life - the good side, the happy and the fantasy side and it's not entirely true. There are always two sides to a coin and this was the second side. When I was doing certain things like breaking stuff, hitting things, killing people, I just realised that there is probably a murderer or a killer in all of us. That side does exist. We might not accept it but at times we do go into that zone. We do dream about this and though we might not talk about it because we know it's wrong, we do feel that way," Varun says.

Even as we are talking about other things, we ask him if he would be game to be roasted in front a live audience like his colleagues and friends, Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor were recently on AIB's Knockout. "I did watch the video and I think they did a tremendous job. Ranveer and Arjun are damn cool. They got roasted and how! But I would be game for it as well, why not! Everyone knows it's taken in the right spirit and it doesn't really offend anyone. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a much older superstar did a roast as well," adds Varun.