Director Suneel Darshan says producer insulted Akshay Kumar: He almost had tears

Dhadkan director Suneel Darshan recalled Akshay Kumar going through a tough phase in his career. In an interview recently, he mentioned how the actor dealt with a series of flop films and kept a strong face. Suneel, who worked with the actor in many films, recalled a producer insulting Akshay by telling him that he didn’t deserve to see a banner of his film being displayed around.
The director spoke to Friday Films and revealed that Hera Pheri and Dhadkan were “halted” by the producers because of Akshay’s dull performance at the box office. He added that “no distributor wanted to touch his film”, but he kept his faith in the actor’s crowd-pulling power.
Suneel said, “Akshay came to me, and he almost had tears in his eyes. He told me that he had asked another producer why they hadn’t put up a banner of his film, and they told him ‘tumhari aukkaat nahi hai ki tumhari film ka banner lagaya jaaye’. I got nervous looking at his nervous face. I got the biggest banner in Juhu with just Akshay’s face on it. The man who was a liability to everyone, I knew he would be my asset.”
Suneel delivered a major global success with Dhadkan, which also starred Shilpa Shetty and Suniel Shetty in important roles apart from Akshay.
Elaborating further on the actor’s “bad condition” at that time, Suneel shared in the interview, “There was a problem. He had had many flops during that time and many of his prominent films had been halted midway. Like Hera Pheri, the film was shot 90 per cent, and then it was blocked. Dhadkan, four reels were made, but it was also halted.”
Akshay opened up on the same phase during the trailer launch of Bade Miyan Chote Miyan earlier this year. He shared that he learnt a lot from that time but never backed out. “It is not that I have not seen (this phase before), there was a time when I had 16 consecutive flops in one go in my career. But I stood there and kept on working, and I’ll still do that. This is one film this year for which we have all done lots of hard work, and now we are going to see the results. We hope this is going to bring good luck to all of us,” he explained.
The actor is once again looking for a big hit at the box office after a slew of films which failed to impress the audience. Akshay has got Jolly LLB 3, Housefull 5, the yet-to-be-titled film on C Sankaran Nair, and Sky Force, among others.