Akshay Kumar was yet to find his feet in the patriotic genre of films when he gave the now memorable monologue in Vipul Amrutlal Shah’s Namastey London. The scene had Akshay’s character telling a British man about India’s rich cultural history and its diversity and the scene resonated with the audience at the time. In fact, the scene is still quite loved by the fans of the film. In a recent interview, Vipul spoke about the making of the scene and how he worked tirelessly with the writers to make sure that every line delivered here was sharp and concise. He also recalled how the attitude of the local British crew changed after they learnt about India while shooting this scene.
Crediting his writers Suresh Nair and Ritesh Shah, Vipul said that they worked on this scene for over three months and kept fine tuning it until the morning of the shoot. Recalling Akshay and Katrina’s reaction to the scene, Vipul shared with Pinkvilla, “Akshay and Katrina had read the script and they were aware of this scene but I kept telling them that don’t go by those dialogues, I am going to get you a better scene so when they read it, they said ‘Vipul, this is a killer, it’s terrific and it’s going to be huge’.”
Vipul said that he asked Akshay and Katrina to keep it as simple as possible as he was extremely confident in the effective dialogues of the scene. “My instruction to both of then was just it keep it very simple. We don’t need to push any histrionics in it. Just say it as politely as possible and it will deliver and that’s what Akshay did and Katrina did,” he said. In fact, Vipul said that Akshay and Katrina got so “emotionally worked up” that they were quick to finish it. “I finished Akshay and Katrina’s dialogue part in less than 2-3 hours because they were so emotionally worked up,” he said.
When asked if the actors improvised the scene in any way, the director immediately said no and shared, “Not in this scene. I didn’t allow.” For Akshay, who was known for his image in action and comic roles until then, this was one o his very first monologues where he showed his patriotic side. Vipul recalled, “This was the first time that Akshay did a big monologue and before that, he had not done many monologues of this kind so I was very curious to see how he is going to go about it.”
Talking about the impact of the scene, Vipul said that as they were shooting the scene, he could see that the crew around him was surprised to learn all of this information about India. He said that they had only flown 12-13 crew members from India and the remaning crew of about 300 people was from the UK. “Some of the Britishers said you must be making this up, this can’t be real and we said every line of it is real and they were shocked. The transformation because of the scene had already started when we were shooting and when you see this reaction, the unit and the actors get more charged,” he said and added that the Indian crew started feeling that they are “more powerful than this crew of 300 from the UK.”
Namastey London was a turning point in Katrina’s career. The film had her playing a UK-born Indian who eventually falls in love with her roots after she meets a man, played by Akshay, from Punjab.