'He has major mood swings': Hansal Mehta recalls Manoj Bajpayee being 'a pain' while shooting Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar

Critically acclaimed filmmaker Hansal Mehta recently revealed that he likes to work with people whom he gets along with. He said that actor Rajkummar Rao was forced upon him by director Anurag Kashyap and casting director Mukesh Chhabra. The duo hit it off well and ended up working together on six projects(Shahid, Omerta etc). However, the same he did not feel about talented Manoj Bajpayee. Recalling Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar's (2000) shoot, Mehta said that he had difficulty working with Bajpayee.

In a recent Cinema Express roundtable, Mehta mentioned that Bajpayee has major mood swings. “We made Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar!! in 2000, and he was a pain in that film. But at heart, he’s a nice guy. He’s not a bad person. You get that vibe. When we were working together, I used to get very irritated. I would ask, ‘Manoj, why are you behaving like this?’ That was the time when Manoj would take the character and just go. I don’t know how he decided that the character should be irritable, but he thrust it on everyone. Everyone used to run away from him.”

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Mehta also remembered that actor Saurabh Shukla also used to get offended by him. He said, “He be like, ‘I went to speak to him and he was mean. What’s wrong with him?'” Having said that, Mehta also added that he had told this to Bajpayee and he brushed it off saying that he was very young at the time. He said he was young too but found it difficult to understand what was happening either.

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Meanwhile, Mehta and Bajpayee reunited for Aligarh after a decade. The filmmaker said that the film was one of his fondest movies. Looking forward, he is set to release The Buckingham Murders, which features Kareena Kapoor Khan in the lead role. The film is about a grieving British-Indian detective who is assigned the case of a murdered child in Buckinghamshire. On the other hand, Bajpayee will next be seen in the black comedy series Killer Soup, directed by Abhishek Choubey.