Will Big B go bare?

This is going to be Bollywood’s most talked about swipe of the razor. After almost a decade sporting his famous French cut beard, Amitabh Bachchan will appear on screen almost clean-shaven in his forthcoming film Paa.

This is going to be Bollywood’s most talked about swipe of the razor. After almost a decade sporting his famous French cut beard, Amitabh Bachchan will appear on screen almost clean-shaven in his forthcoming film Paa. The film is to be directed by ad man-turned-director Balki of Cheeni Kum fame, and it is a co-production between Bachchan’s AB Corp Ltd and Big Pictures.

HT Image

Bachchan will look clean-shaven, but the beard will not come off entirely, because the star is said to be superstitious about it. He is to going keep some of it, but mask it with make-up, says our source. The beard marks Bachchan’s comeback from a dark phase through the 2000 film Mohabbatein. Then came KBC and there was no turning back.

Paa was announced right after Cheeni Kum. “Amitabh would be seen in a very different look,” Balki had said then. He would not give any details now, but says that “it is a role and a look in which no one has seen him”. Bachchan blogged: “It took 4 hrs for it all to come on and another hour to take it off. But may I say the results were simply phenomenal. The teams of make-up artists flown in from Los Angeles... were exemplary in their job.”

In Paa, after Sarkar, Abhishek again plays Bachchan’s son. AB Jr will also look into “other production aspects like scriptwriting, music, locations etc”.