Vicky Kaushal made his debut as a leading actor in Neeraj Ghaywan's independent drama Masaan. The actor earned widespraed acclaim for his performance as Deepak Kumar and especially for one particular scene, famous for its line 'yeh dukh kaahe khatam nahi hota be' (why does this pain never ends), where his character breaks down after his lover's death.
In a recent interview, the Sardar Udham actor revealed that he had actually imagined his mother's death before filming the sequence. Speaking to Nikhil Taneja for 'Be A Man, Yaar' series on Yuvaa, Vicky said, "That scene was exploring the emotion of not feeling loss, but to understand loss. A man is just not being able to understand loss."
"I sat alone on the ghat, on the banks of the Ganga, and for one hour, I was just imagining my mom not being there anymore. That I have lost my mom, I will go back from Masaan shoot and my mom won't be there. And they would say that your first film was being shot and we didn't want to tell you, because you might come back and then you would lose this film. And I made a whole story that it's been 20 days that my mom has passed away, nobody has told me, and everything is done, now there is nothing left. As much as I try to understand what happened, why is she not there? But she's not there and that's the reality. Now try and feel this reality, because she's just not there", the actor added.
Vicky continued, "Then I went to shoot. We started the scene and the scene, as a talkie, just ends with that line "Yaar saala yeh dukh kaahe khatam nahi hota (Why does this pain never end)", and the scene was supposed to end there. There was no crying, nothing. Because I was already pent up wih that emotion, so what happened was that the train that passed us behind, it actually passed us. It was not planned. I was drunk and I reacted to that train and I started reciting what Shaalu has said in the film, "Tu kisi rail si guzarti hai, main kisi pull sa that-tharata hoon (You pass like a train and I shudder like a bridge)", and then I started saying everything that Shaalu says in the film and I continued doing that. And I don't know whatever I had bottled up, all that released and I started crying. And that's why when you see the film, in that shot I got out of frame, I fall, friends coming in, picking me up, nothing was planned. Neeraj didn't say cut and we kept shooting, and that's how we got the scene."
Also starring Shweta Tripathi, Pankaj Tripathi, Sanjay Mishra, and Richa Chadha, Masaan was screened at the Un Certain Regard section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, and has achieved a cult status since its release eight years ago.
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