Kartik Aaryan was told ‘he won’t get work even in ads and serials’ by casting director who called him to apologise after success
Kartik Aaryan may be one of the most sought after and busiest actors in Bollywood right now but getting here was not a cakewalk. In a recent interview, he revealed how he, too, had to face his own fair share of rejections and harsh words.
Kartik recalled in an interview to Filmfare magazine how he was told by a casting director that nothing will become of him. “After queuing up for hours for auditions and then being told in front of everyone, ‘Go. You’re not fit,’ was humiliating. It breaks your self-confidence. A popular casting director would ignore me. He’d say, ‘Iska kuch nahin ho sakta. He won’t get work even in ads and serials. He’s wasting his time. He’ll end up struggling all his life,’ he said.
However, the same casting director later realised his mistake when he saw one of his films. “He called me and said, ‘I’m extremely sorry. The only time I went wrong in my whole career was with you. You proved me wrong,’” he said.
Kartik also talked about how he struggled to find work in the beginning and only learnt about the auditions for Pyaar Ka Punchnama through Facebook. “I read about the auditions of Pyaar Ka Punchnama (PKP) on one of the FB walls. I had no money to make a portfolio. So I cropped my pictures from the college album and sent it to them. They called me for the auditions. The process carried on for six months. Finally, Punchnama happened. My monologue from the film went viral. It was on everyone’s phone. It was trending everywhere – on FB as well. It’s funny that the same platform, which led me to the Punchnama audition, brought me fame. People started calling me ‘the monologue boy’. The film became a sleeper hit,” he said.
But that was not the end of his struggles. He said his auto-rickshaw overturned before the film was to begin shooting and he feared if he would get the part now. “My autorickshaw overturned and my leg got stuck in it. I was badly injured. I was taken to the hospital on a cycle by strangers. I called my mom and began crying that I’d lose the film. When director Luv Ranjan and producers Kumar Mangat and Abhishek Pathak came to see me that night, I begged them, ‘Sir please mujhe film se mat nikalna’. Thankfully, they waited for me,” he said.
Kartik has since starred in films like Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety and Luka Chuppi, both hits at the box office. He also managed to bag films like Imtiaz Ali’s sequel to Love Aaj Kal, Bhool Bhulaiyya 2 and Pati Patni Aur Woh.