25 years of Ishq: I had to continue shaving my head for a year and a half, recalls Dalip Tahil

Actor Dalip Tahil, who portrayed the character of Juhi Chawla’s onscreen father in Ishq takes a trip down memory lane as the film clocks 25 years of its release. Looking back, the actor talks about how the film, also starring Kajol, Ajay Devgn, Aamir Khan and late Sadashiv Amrapurkar , survived the test of time, and emerged as one of the most loved Hindi film of the 90s.

“It certainly feels special that the film stood the test of time. It’s very popular till date,” shares Tahil, recounting a heartwarming incident: “I remember I was in a lift and there was a little school girl with me. She must have been 12 or 13. She looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Uncle, I like your acting very much’. I was curious to know where she has seen me, so I asked her. Initially I thought she would say OTT, but she mentioned Ishq. She said she had seen that film five times and that I was fantastic in it. That’s the kind of audience this film managed to create.”

Tahil feels glad that even after 25 years, there is a generation that still would watch Ishq and finds it interesting. And he credits director Indra Kumar for this success and love.

“It was my second film with Indra Kumar after Raja, and I would say he’s someone with a very clear version. He knows exactly what he wants from his characters and that reflects in his work,” says the actor, adding that he always trusted Kumar blindly and knew that the result that would come out would be good.

“When he called me for Ishq, he told me, ‘Dalip, I want you to shave your head’. I said, ‘Indra, for you I’d do that. However, you take year and a half to make a movie and that would create continuity issue for other projects’. Though He insisted and assured me that he’d wrap up the film in six months, let me tell you I had to continue shaving my head for a year and a half after that. But I loved it,” laughs Tahil as he recounts these memories.

On how a film as simple as Ishq went on to become so iconic, Tahil says that the film focused on entertaining the audiences without any shame. “If you look, Ishq is a very common story, a family drama about two girls and two boys, there was no intellectual stuff, but the way all the characters were put together, it was an out an out entertainer. There were some very serious moments, but the audiences were always entertained because the characters as well as the situations were planned in that manner,” concludes the actor.