Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla’s rivalry from the 1990s is well-known. Now, in an interview with Lehren Retro, Raja Hindustani director Dharmesh Darshan has spilled the beans on another incident that confirms the rumors of their heated rivalry and one-upmanship.
After collaborating with Juhi in his directorial debut, the blockbuster action film Lootere (1993), Dharmesh wanted to cast her again as the lead in his next, the 1996 romantic film Raja Hindustani. But Juhi wasn’t convinced of the genre, as it wasn’t an ensemble masala film like Lootere. Dharmesh tried to convince her by comparing the simplicity of Raja Hindustani to the latest blockbuster, Sooraj Barjatya’s 1994 romantic musical Hum Aapke Hain Koun!, starring Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit.
She turned to me and said, ‘But you’re not Sooraj Barjatya.’ Something came on to me, I have a big ego and I said, ‘You’re not Madhuri Dixit’ On that little thing, she said no to the film. But she’s educated, so the next day, she apologized and asked me to see her again,” said Dharmesh in the interview.
The filmmaker added that right when he was supposed to meet Juhi that day, he instead went and narrated the film to Karisma Kapoor, who was eventually finalized for the film. Even the lead actor, Aamir Khan, approved of Dharmesh’s choice. Along with Juhi, a couple of more actors like Pooja Bhatt and Aishwarya Rai were considered for the role, but they couldn’t do the film for various reasons.
