Vicky Kaushal lived on biscuits and liquids

Vicky Kaushal’s body was massive when he was approached by Shoojit Sircar to star in his film on Sardar Udham Singh. According to one of our sources, the actor was then just done with his 2019-film Uri, which needed him in that bulky frame of body.

The film, which has now been titled Sardar Udham, shows Vicky in two different looks: one when the character Vicky plays was 21 years old, around the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, and the other, over 20 years later, after he kills Michael O’Dwyer in London.

“Shoojit was keen that he looked the part and looked lean and lanky as a 21-year-old. So Vicky took it upon himself to lose weight and restricted himself to a diet of just biscuits in addition to a liquid diet. It was a tough regimen to follow for two months, but Vicky aced the look by the time he was ready to shoot,” says our source.

“The second part of the film had him look the part of a 36- to 41-year-old to reflect the time when Udham Singh had landed in the UK in 1934 and killed Dwyer in 1940 at the Caxton Hall in Westminster. For those scenes, Vicky had to look much bulkier and put on the required mass and weight to look older for the character.”

Sardar Udham also has Banita Sandhu in the role of a deaf and mute girl and Amol Parashar as Bhagat Singh. The makers could not shoot the Jallianwala Bagh massacre scene at the location given how different the place looks today. Sircar and his team shot those scenes for a month at a nearby government school, where they could recreate the entire atmosphere.