Mohit Suri on how his leading man prepared to play a national level athlete in their upcoming romance-drama
Natasha Coutinho (MUMBAI MIRROR; March 22, 2017)

In Mohit Suri’s upcoming romance-drama, Half Girlfriend, which is a screen retelling of Chetan Bhagat’s novel of the same name, Arjun Kapoor plays Madhav Jha, a young basketball player from Bihar. And while the 31-year-old actor underwent dialect training for his part, his prep to play the athlete was particularly arduous.

“It was important to get the nuances right and for the sport to look as authentic as possible on screen. In order to achieve that, Arjun was required to become a basketball player instead of just enacting the part. He went through rigorous training for three months for which top NBA coaches were flown down from the US,” Mohit reveals to Mirror.

The filmmaker further informs that the sport sets the ball rolling in the leads’ (Shraddha Kapoor plays Arjun’s love interest) relationship. It breaks the language barrier and brings the protagonists, who hail from different classes and backgrounds, together.

Queries about how long Arjun took to get the game right are met with a smile, “Arjun has played basketball in school so he was familiar with the sport. But to portray a character like Madhav, who is a national level player, he put in a lot of hours to bring finesse to his game. He picked up tricks, worked on technique, even learnt to score baskets from ‘half court.’”.