MUMBAI: Abhishek says Bob Biswas is better than Kahaani: ‘With all due respect…’

MUMBAI: Abhishek Bachchan will be seen
in Diya Annapurna Ghosh’s Bob Biswas, a spin-off of her dad Sujoy Ghosh’s
Kahaani.

Actor Abhishek Bachchan will soon be seen as the middle
class Bengali assassin in Bob Biswas. The film is a spin-off of 2012 movie
Kahaani, directed by Sujoy Ghosh and starring Vidya
Balan in the lead.

Bob
Biswas is directed by Diya Annapurna Ghosh, Sujoy’s daughter. In a new
interview, Abhishek said that he recently watched the hit original and found
Bob Biswas to be the better film.

“I saw
Kahaani last year during the lockdown for the first time. I finished almost 80
per cent of the shoot, then we had to break because of the lockdown and halfway
through, one day I finally said that ‘okay, let me see this film,’” he told
Indian Express in an interview. He added, “I think our film is better. With all
due respect to Sujoy, his daughter (Diya) is better than him.”

Kahaani
starred Vidya as Vidya Bagchi, a pregnant woman searching for her missing
husband in Kolkata. Played by actor Saswata Chatterjee, Bob Biswas –an LIC
agent who moonlighted as a cold-blooded contract killer– became the breakout
character from the film.

In an
interview with PTI, Sujoy said that Abhishek was considered for the original as
well. The first draft of the film focused on the characters of Vidya Bagchi and
Bob Biswas but later underwent a change as Abhishek couldn’t do the film.

When
Sujoy started working on the spin-off “Bob Biswas”, he went back to
Bachchan to play the titular part.

“When
I started creating the new Bob, I went back to that same person and asked him
if he would do it now, if he has the dates. He immediately said yes. That was
Abhishek. “When I was thinking of the new one, he just happened. He was
always the first Bob when we wrote the first draft, which never happened.”