We had first heard about Imtiaz Ali's brother Sajid Ali's directorial project 'Laila-Majnu' in 2014. It was announced that he will be directing a romantic film under Ekta Kapoor's banner Balaji Motion Pictures. Describing the film, Ali had then told Indian Express in an interview, “It’s a classic, intense Laila Majnu story. Though I don’t know how close I will get to it, I would like to contemporise it.”
Sajid had said that he was looking for a 27-year-old man and a 24-year-old girl to play the lead parts in his film. A poster of the film was unveiled some time back and today, the teaser of 'Laila Majnu' got released. Shot against the breath-taking yet tumultuous backdrop of Kashmir, the teaser gives us a glimpse of a fairytale-like love story. But, one thing that both the poster and the teaser managed to do was concealing the identities of the leads. Not just were there actors' faces deliberately hidden in the teaser, but they were also not tagged or mentioned any where in the official tweets.
After digging up a little DNA somehow managed to find the names of the actors who play Laila and Majnu in the film. Sajid Ali's film will see Avinash Tiwary playing the role of Majnu while new comer Tripti Dimri will be seen reprising Laila's part. Avinash was last seen in Barun Sobti's 'Tu Mera Sunday'. He has earlier done a TV serial called 'Yuddh' with Amithabh Bachchan.
Tripti Dimri had made her Bollywood debut with Bobby Deol and Sunny Deol starrer Poster Boys. Earlier reports suggest that there was someone called Deepthi, who was brought on board to play 'Laila' but it seems Tripti bagged the role later.
Sumit Kaul, who plays a pivotal character in the film, had uploaded some pictures from the film-set earlier in April this year on his instagram account but they have unfornuately been pulled-down now. However, we still got our hands on this picture where Sumit is seen with the lead couple of the film - Avinash and Tripti. Had it not been him, we wouldn't have been able to bring the names of these actors to you.
The fact that the actors' instagram accounts have been made private and that Sumit was made to delete all behind-the-scene pictures from the film-sets an hour after we published this article is proof enough of how keen the makers were on maintaing secrecy around their prime characters. Perhaps, this was the only strategy they deemed fit to market a film about a love-story that has been told over a thousand times.
However, there is still a little confusion around the name of the actress as Sumit had mentioned two female names in the hashtags he had used in a few of the group pictures he had instagrammed earlier. While one was of Tripti, another was of Sahiba. Both the girls featured together in the group pictures. But we still have our bets on Tripti, as she has already appeared in 'Poster Boys', as per IMDB. Besides the main cast, the film will have local artists from Kashmir playing other characters.
Sajid's first film Banana also starred a host of newcomers including Zeishan Qadri who wrote the dialogues for Gangs of Wasseypur.Produced by John Abraham Entertainment, the film hasn't got a release date as of yet.
'Laila Majnu' will hit the screens on August 24, 2018.
