Had everything worked out as planned, Pooja Hegde would have displayed her skills as a stand-up comedian by now. No, the actress wasn’t planning on doing a stand-up comedy show on stage for a live audience, she’s playing a standup comedian in the Telugu film, Most Eligible Bachelor. Reportedly, the casting for the romantic comedy, written and directed by Bhaskar, was done after the makers auditioned about 100 actresses and models for two of the female central characters.

Talking about her prep for the part, Pooja, who will be seen in Rohit Shetty’s Cirkus, Prabhas’ Radhe Shyam and a few other films across languages (Hindi, Tamil and Telugu), says, “It is so tough to play a stand-up comedian on camera because normally, comedians have a set to perform for an hour, which they have practiced and rehearsed over a period. In the film, one had to build the joke and the punchlines to encapsulate the essence of a standup comedy show. The film is not about the show, so you are not at liberty to show an entire comedy set. Doing stand-up comedy for a film is tough. I met so many stand-up comics and tried to understand how they prepare their punches and how they use the mic to create a certain effect when they are on stage. I mean, it takes a different skill set for the comedians to achieve that.”

Most Eligible Bachelor went on floors in July 2019 and major portions of the film were shot in New York in mid-January 2020. The shooting came to a halt towards March when Akhil Akkineni, who plays the film’s male protagonist, was injured during a schedule in India. The shoot was further delayed due the Coronavirus pandemic and resumed in September 2020.