
Vikramaditya Motwane recently revealed in an interaction with The Comment Section that his 2020 film AK vs AK was initially written with Aamir Khan in mind. The meta-dark comedy film finally went to Anil Kapoor, who plays himself in it and is pitted against a psychotic film director played by Anurag Kashyap, who kidnaps his daughter Sonam Kapoor.
Speaking about it, he said, “It was always AK vs AK, so we had to go and cast an actor who would fit it. We got this idea in 2014 by co-writer Avinash Sampath and all of us were excited. He had sent it as AK vs AK, which was supposed to be Anurag Kashyap vs Aamir Khan and I immediately thought that Aamir won’t do it so let’s not go there.”
Later, they discussed which other actor to approach with similar initials. However, they dropped the idea and went to Saif Ali Khan for the role, who rejected it. “Then we shot with Shahid in Mumbai for the film, which was great, fantastic. I wish that would have stayed.”
Finally, Anurag suggested that Anil Kapoor would be perfect fit for the role. Vikram said, “Cinematically Anil Kapoor had a point to prove that he was still relevant. Then I went to Amsterdam where Avinash lives and in three days we made it into an Anil Kapoor kind of a film. I came back and said to Anil, ‘Sir ek hai kuch, will you read it?’ I was expecting he would read the script and throw it away.”
He added, “But he called me and said he had really liked it and wanted to do it. It just happened very quickly. Anurag wrote the dialogues for himself, so all that self-deprecating humour is all him.”
The film also starred Harshvardhan Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor playing themselves and was released on Netflix in 2020.