‘People used to follow him around like sycophants’, why did Javed Akhtar not work with Rajesh Khanna? Amitabh’s name…

New Delhi. Films starring Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan used to create a stir at the box office. In that era, they made many actors superstars overnight. Amitabh Bachchan is also one of them. But after a while, he stopped working with Rajesh Khanna. Now years later, Javed has revealed why he did so.

Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar are a unique pair of Bollywood who brought about a revolution in Indian cinema in the 70s. This pair gave many superhit films like ‘Sholay’, ‘Deewar’, ‘Zanjeer’, ‘Don’, ‘Haathi Mere Saathi’ and ‘Yaadon Ki Baaraat’. Rajesh Khanna was even upset with this pair. He believed that Amitabh Bachchan shined in the films written by them and his career sank badly. Now Javed has revealed why he distanced himself from Rajesh Khanna.

The actor was seen in the 1788 crore blockbuster, a big name in the South, has played the role of Ramya Krishnan’s husband, brother and father

There were sycophants around Rajesh Khanna
Javed Akhtar worked with many actors in that era whose career changed overnight. Actors like Amitabh Bachchan’s luck shined after working with him. During a conversation with YouTube channel SAM, Javed Akhtar told why he could not work much with Rajesh Khanna. He said, in India, when a child was born, he used to say mummy-papa later and Rajesh Khanna used to say first. There came a time when we felt that it had become very difficult to work with him. Actually, he was always surrounded by sycophants and flatterers. This was the reason why we kept our distance. Amitabh’s name was perfect for the character in our films.

This was the reason for casting Amitabh
Javed further said that Amitabh was perfect for the kind of films we were thinking of making. Although he was not a superstar at that time, he was a very good actor. As soon as we saw him, we felt that he could be our Vijay. Revealing the reason behind naming Amitabh as Vijay in every film, he said, Vijay sounded good. We used this name in every film, be it Deewar, Trishul.

Let us tell you that Javed had also revealed that we were going to name the name Vijay in Sholay as well. But the other name Veeru also started with the letter ‘V’, so it did not look right. That is why we decided to remove the V and keep the name Jai.

Tags: Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna