Naseeruddin Shah, who had auditioned for the lead role in Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’, has no regrets over not been selected to enact the iconic character.
When Shah learnt about Attenborough’s prospective film, he didn’t give much of a thought to the possibility of playing the role as he was 14 then. But when the iconic British director was to visit Mumbai in the late 1970s, Shah thought the prospect was worth pursuing this time.
“My aim, however, was not to play Gandhi. I just wanted to be a star in an international project. I dreamt of playing Zorro. So I have no regrets that Gandhi’s role finally went to Ben Kingsley,” 64-year-old Shah told PTI in an interview.
“I regret that I am not an international star like Ben Kingsley. But then if I had got the role what would have become of Ben Kingsley,” he says in a lighter vein.
But he feels he was “not enough skilled at that time as Ben to have pulled it off the way he did.”
However, he says that it is a “pungent irony” that in his entire career, this is one role which he went after and it eluded him completely.
