Director Sriram Raghavan opened up about telling Saif Ali Khan that he’d changed his mind about casting him in Merry Christmas, after having shook on it previously. In an interview, the filmmaker said that Saif was understandably annoyed, but the best that he could do in that moment was to assure Saif that he’d try his best to make it up to him. Sriram eventually cast Vijay Sethupathi as the film’s male lead, opposite Katrina Kaif.
In an interview with Galatta Plus, the director was asked about his writing process, and how the character evolved over time. “This story is from a different era. If I’d just taken the bare-bones plot, I could’ve made an episode of CID… I love Saif as an actor, although our last film didn’t work. That time he wasn’t doing so much, so I thought he’d be fun. I went to meet him, he loved the story, said, ‘Great, let’s do it’. And then, I started fleshing it out.”
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Sriram continued, “When I was fleshing it out, I suddenly felt that the story needed an X-factor that we might not get from a conventional pairing. Saif and Katrina had done more than a couple of movies together. So, I went to my producer and told him, ‘I think think I’ve made a mistake, I don’t think it’s working out’. He said, ‘You better go and tell him now’.” Sriram confessed that he was nervous about the meeting with Saif. “How do you go and tell him? The last time you met, he hugged you and everything,” he said. “It wasn’t that he was a problem. I could have done the film (with him) also, but it’s just that as I was writing it, something wasn’t clicking, I don’t know what… It was a very tough thing to go and tell him. He was naturally p****d off. I said, ‘Some day I hope to make up…'”
Sriram said that this happened in 2018, when he didn’t even have an alternate actor in mind. He also clarified that he never shot anything with Saif. Merry Christmas will be released in theatres on Friday in two versions. Sriram filmed the Hindi version first, and then, mainly as a means to mitigate costs, filmed a companion version in Tamil, featuring a slightly different cast and certain tweaks. It’s his first feature since 2018’s critical and commercial smash hit Andhadhun.
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