Weighty issue

Flab is fab. The mantra may make Bollywood’s anorexic starlets cringes, but a host of actors are happily putting on the pounds to prepare for their films. While film-makers feel gaining weight for a role may sometimes lend credibility to a character, actors are glad to comply, and binge.

The most recent actor to join the bandwagon is Hrithik Roshan, who confessed to gaining a lot of weight for his role in the film, Guzaarish. For the role of a magician, who has been restricted to a wheelchair, the 36-year-old gorged on junk food. “It was after 15 years that I had batata vada, samosa and all sorts of junk food, which I was not allowed to have earlier. I had to look like a person not in the pink of health,” Duggu, who gained 15kgs, said.

In June this year, Priyanka Chopra tweeted about how she was asked to gain weight for Vishal Bhardwaj’s upcoming film. The actor, who gained 4kgs for the role, posted, “I’ve been on a put-on-some-serious-weight kind of diet for Saat Khoon Maaf... yuck! I feel so unhealthy!”

Actor Vidya Balan, too, put on 5kgs for her role of a village belle in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Ishqiya, which released earlier this year. “Krishna (her character) is a typical Indian woman with a voluptuous figure. She requires curves to look good in a sari,” Vidya had said.

Newbie Zarine Khan, too, was put on a chocolate diet for months to gain weight for her debut film, Veer. Zarine, who weighed 54 kilos before the shoot, put on 8kgs in three months, after gorging on cakes and pastries. For his role in the 2007 film, Guru, actor Abhishek Bachchan gained 11kgs. “In a month, I managed to put on 11kgs for Guru. The weight I had gained for the film stayed on me in Drona and Dostana,” the actor had rued.