Mira Nair recently revealed that she suggested Irrfan Khan's name to Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Leonardo DiCaprio-starrer The Revenant.
Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the finest actors in world cinema, has been nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards or the Oscars five times for The Aviator, Blood Diamond, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Revenant, and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. It was only at 88th Academy Awards in 2016 that he ended up winning the Oscar stauette for Alejandro G. Iñárritu's directorial.
But do you know the late Irrfan Khan could have shared screen space with Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant? Oscar-winning Mexican director Inarritu was keen to work with Irrfan Khan, revealed the Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair who had suggested the actor’s name to the filmmaker.
According to Nair, Inarritu was looking for an Indian actor for one of his projects and happened to ask her for a recommendation. “I remember well when I had visited him (Irrfan) he was really ailing but still fighting...My other friend, the great filmmaker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had said, ‘I’m really looking for this Indian everyman’. I said, ‘There are many but there’s one great one’. And it was going to be Irrfan...But such is life,” the 66-year-old director said on Tuesday night during a session at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival in Mumbai.
Irrfan, who starred in multiple Hollywood films such as Life of Pi and Inferno, died in April 2020 following a battle with a rare form of cancer. Nair worked with him in Salaam Bombay!, The Namesake, and her short in the anthology film, New York I Love You. Salaam Bombay!, which is among the three Indian films to for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, was Nair and Irrfan's feature film debut.
Coming back to The Revenant, apart from Leonardo DiCaprio winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor, the Western action drama film also won a couple of Oscars - Alejandro G. Iñárritu for Best Director and Emmanuel Lubezki for Best Cinematography. It had received a total of 12 nominations at the 88th Academy Awards, the highest that year.
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