Manoj Bajpayee recently opened up about the bond he shared with the late actor Sushant Singh Rajput and said that he would often tell him to have a thick skin in the film industry. Manoj reflected on the time he spent with the actor while working with him on Sonchiriya (2019). Sushant allegedly died by suicide in June, 2020.
In an interview with Mid-day, Manoj said, “Nobody knows what happened to him. All of us are only presuming and guessing things. I have worked with him, and I can say he wasn’t a mad guy. He was fairly well-versed in too many things. He was a voracious reader. I found him reading all the time, both on the set and off the set.”
He added, “He was a moody guy, and so am I. The sets of Sonchiriya had me, Ashutosh Rana, Ranvir Shorey and Sushant. We all had our off days. Just before the pandemic, when I went out to shoot, he had called me and said, ‘Manoj bhai, I really crave the mutton you cook so next time when you make it, please invite me over.'”
Sushant’s death affected Manoj personally. “I must tell you that his death news hit me so badly that I was sad for three months as if I have known him so personally and closely,” he said in the interview.
Manoj shared that the two would talk often about the industry and how it functioned. “As far as the industry is concerned, we used to have chats about the industry and its politics. I always told him to keep thick skin. I had the thick skin because I have faced so many rejections. It was a part of my life but a lot of my friends didn’t have that thick skin. They couldn’t face rejections like I did.”
Sushant made his Bollywood debut with Kai Po Che (2013) and went to star in films like MS Dhoni: The Untold Story (2015), Raabta (2017), Kedarnath (2019) and Chhichhore (2019) among others. His last film, Dil Bechara, released on Disney+ Hotstar in 2020 after his death.