Actor Dalip Tahil, who portrayed the character of actor Juhi Chawla’s onscreen dad in Ishq, says the reason why it emerges as one of the most loved Hindi films of the ’90s is because it focused on entertaining the audiences without any forced drama.

Crediting the movie’s success to director Indra Kumar, Tahil says, “He knows exactly what he wants from his characters, and that shows in his work. There was no intellectual stuff, but the way all the characters were put together, it was an out and out entertainer.”

His character in the movie was bald, and recalling the same, Tahil shares, “Indra told me, ‘Dalip, I want you to shave your head’. I said, ‘For you, I’d do that’. He assured me that he’d wrap up the film in six months, but I had to keep shaving my head for a year and a half because it [used to] take that much time to make movies. But I loved it.”

Tahil also shares a recent incident that reasserts Ishq’s popularity even now: “I was in a lift, and there was a schoolgirl, who said, ‘Uncle, I like your acting’. I was curious to know where she’d seen me. I thought she’d say OTT, but she mentioned Ishq. She said she had seen that film five times! That’s the kind of audience this film managed to create.”