On July 4, it was a wrap for Irrfan Khan on his international project, Inferno.

The actor has been in Budapest for the last month-and-a-half shooting for the Ron Howard-directed thriller based on Don Brown's eponymous fourth novel in the Robert Langdon series.

Irrfan plays Harry Sims, The Provost, who heads The Consortium. He helps Bertrand Zobrist, a billionaire geneticist, in his mission to control population explosion through an engineered plague. Zobrist has created the vector virus which randomly activates to employ DNA modification to cause sterility in 1/3rd of the human race. The Provost unknowingly becomes a party to a bioterrorist attack.

It's a challenging role, significant to the plot, and Irrfan who was recently seen as Simon Masrani, owner of the dinosaur park, in Jurassic World, was happy to play it to perfection. But Mirror has learnt that Ron had earlier offered Irrfan the role of Christoph Bruder, head of the SRS, disease prevention and control team, who misreading his intentions, is hot on Langdon's heels.

"Mr Omar (Omar Sy) is playing the character now. It's an interesting role but I was more keen to play The Provost as it offered me a new dimension to explore on screen," says Irrfan.

Fortunately, Ron, who was really keen to have the internationally acclaimed Indian actor as part of his cast, mulled over his request for a while, and then agreed to his choice of role. And before he knew it, he was discussing world cinema, and his own films like The Lunchbox and Life of Pi, with Ron and Tom Hanks. "It's a real honour that an Academy Award-winning director like Ron not only takes me in his film but gives me a role that challenges me as an actor too," he smiles.

Interestingly, when Irrfan zeroed in on The Provost, he had not read the novel and was simply reacting to the story and the script. But on the sets, recently, he met Dan Brown and since by then he was more familiar with the books, they were able to converse on the intricacies of the plot.