Actor Aamir Ali looked back at his success in the world of television, and said that after he won the third season of the dance reality show Nach Baliye along with his ex-wife Sanjeeda Shaikh, the head of the channel told them that for one night, they were the biggest stars in the country. That year, Aamir and Sanjeeda performed at several Bollywood awards shows, and at one of them, were approached by none other than legendary filmmaker Yash Chopra.
Aamir recalled the anecdote in an interview with Siddharth Kannan. He said, “When we won Nach Baliye, I remember Uday Shankar coming to the finale and saying, ‘Tonight, you’re the biggest stars in the country. Just for one night’. And that year, we were called for all the film awards shows. At Star Screen, they made us sit in the front row. I was sure that we’d be asked to move because Akshay Kumar and Shah Rukh Khan were sitting next to us, and it would be really insulting.”
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He continued, “Just as I was thinking about this, Yash Chopra came up to us. He said, ‘Son, Pam is a big fan of your work, she loves you. Can you come and sit with us?’ And I thought that was my ticket to save myself from the embarrassment of being asked to get up. We happily agreed to sit with them. That was the phase… I was getting film offers, but I didn’t want to live in uncertainty like I had for two or three years before.”
Aamir said that he had difficulty transitioning from television to streaming because filmmakers perceived him as a TV star, which made it difficult for them to cast him in performance-oriented roles on streaming shows. Aamir said that he played lead roles in as many as eight television shows across genres, and after a point, the security of a steady paycheque dissuaded him from attempting to relaunch his film career. He said that among the biggest mistakes that he has made in his career was to not take meetings with film casting directors because he was too busy on TV. “I couldn’t go for a meeting for Kai Po Che because I was too busy. I remember Mukesh Chhabra was casting, he kept calling me and I kept delaying it,” he said.
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