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In ‘Irrfan Khan: The Man, The Dreamer, The Star’, Aseem Chhabra writes about how Khan was born to play Maqbool, and Vishal Bhardwaj casting him was both a risk and a masterstroke.
After the moderate success of Makdee (2002), a children’s film, with Shabana Azmi playing a witch, Vishal Bhardwaj wanted to make a gangster film set in Bombay. He was searching for the story, and quite by chance, on a train ride from Dehradun to Delhi with his godson, Vishal asked the kid if he had anything to read. The kid handed Vishal Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb. The book contained 20 stories, adapted from William Shakespeare’s plays. Vishal had not read or heard any of Shakespeare’s plays.
‘The first story I read was, Macbeth,’ Vishal told Seema Chisti at the Express Adda in Delhi. ‘And it was so good. Mere hosh udd gaye. Ki yeh kis tarah ki kahaani hai (I lost my sense of being. What kind of a story was this)?’ Until then Vishal thought literature was boring. In fact, while promoting Maqbool, he admitted that he was not acquainted with English literature at all.
Macbeth’s plot intrigued Vishal so much that he then got the play, read it again, and asked his Makdee co-writer Abbas Tyrewala to write a screenplay, transforming Macbeth into Maqbool. Shakespeare’s Scottish countryside transitioned into the inner city of Bombay from where a Don Corleone-like underworld king Jahangir Khan, aka Abbaji (Pankaj Kapur), rules his empire of illegal businesses and interests in the city’s Hindi film industry. He is well-served by his trusted lieutenant Maqbool (Irrfan Khan) who is having an affair with his boss’s mistress Nimmi (Tabu playing the character of Lady Macbeth). Vishal would later say that he was always fascinated by love triangles and the complications that arose from those plotlines, and so he decided his Lady Macbeth and Macbeth would not be married.
#Casting
Initially, Vishal Bhardwaj offered Maqbool’s role to Kay Kay Menon, but he turned it down for a war drama with Amitabh Bachchan - Deewaar: Let’s Bring Our Heroes Home (2004). That film vanished, and surely Kay Kay must have regretted his decision.
Unclear about whom to cast as Maqbool, Vishal even talked to Kamal Haasan for that role. Naseeruddin Shah was already supposed to play one of the characters in the film. So Vishal told Naseer that he had talked to Kamal for the role of Maqbool. Naseer was livid. ‘I said, “Look, if you are talking to him, then I am out,” he sa
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