EXCLUSIVE: Abhimanyu Dassani on winning Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Meenakshi Sundareshwar: “It’s almost like my granddad’s birthday gift”

By Monica Yadav -

February 21, 2022 - 8:39 PM IST

Kicking off 2022 on a huge note, Bollywood actor Abhimanyu Dassani is living the dream as he accepted his first-ever Dadasaheb Phalke Award on Sunday. The actor was felicitated with the People's Choice Best Actor Award for his performance in the 2021 movie Meenakshi Sundareshwar in which he co-starred alongside Sanya Malhotra. The romance drama premiered on Netflix in November, depicting the story of a newlywed couple, long-distance relationships, career choices, and the many other challenges that come along the way.

EXCLUSIVE: Abhimanyu Dassani on winning Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Meenakshi Sundareshwar: “It’s almost like my granddad’s birthday gift”

Speaking to Bollywood Hungama after his huge win, Abhimanyu Dassani states that it's even a bigger achievement since it is his grandfather's birthday. "Yeah, it's my granddad's birthday," says the overwhelmed actor, adding, "I mean, he was very happy. It's almost like his birthday gift."

"I was extremely surprised. I had no clue. I was just trying to think like 'Is this happening?' I am grateful for this film. It was the team's hard work. I just did [what they told me to do &] they just made it easy for me. I was happy that I could get this back home to my granddad and it's my director's [Vivek Soni] first film. So he was extremely ecstatic and elated. I just got to meet him right now for dinner," an elated Meenakshi Sundareshwar actor says.

Speaking of the glorious moment, he is happy to make his parents, Bhagyashree and Himalaya Dasani, proud of his work. "At the end of the day, all of us, when we make life decisions, we always keep this in our head, that you do want to make your parents proud and happy at the very core of it. I took one step which made them proud for this moment," he adds.

Debuted in 2019 with critically acclaimed Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota, it took a while for Dassani for his second movie to release due to the hurdles of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though he completed three movies back-to-back, two of them are releasing in 2022. Speaking about the accolades coming his way for Meenakshi Sundareshwar, Abhimanyu says, "The fact that it was a slice of life, and anyone who watched it, connected to the moments and at the end of the film, no matter what age group or part of the world you were at, you left happy and hopeful. I think the passion that the whole team put in the director's vision, the costume, the editor, the DOP, made everything look so beautiful. I guess everyone put their heart and soul into this film, and, more importantly, just enjoyed doing what they were doing. It was a very happy environment."

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Abhimanyu Dassani emphasizes that it was a family-like environment on set and that showed onscreen as well. "It almost became like a family on set. And then we had the family equations with the other actors. We just enjoyed ourselves. All of us are just very happy that people connected to it. The labour of love, actually, was appreciated, and we wanted to spread love. And now we're just getting some of that love back," he adds.

In recent times, Abhimanyu Dassani says that he really enjoyed Ranveer Singh starrer 83 and hopes to do a sports-centric film someday. When asked if there was a movie that impacted in some way, he says, "I really enjoyed watching 83. I am sure I have said this before but a sports film like something that I would love to portray. I have the utmost respect for athletes and if I can be a part of providing some kind of encouragement to any sport, to our, the youth of the nation, and even to the players that are representing the nation, I mean, it will be an opportunity that I would jump on. That's something that I'd really like to put 110% of my work and, you know, represent them in a way that they would feel proud."

Abhimanyu Dassani has an interesting set of movies coming up and he doesn't want to put himself in a certain genre box but wants to continue exploring every kind of work. "Everyone has a habit of putting people into a box and every time you make a box, I will break it," he says. "If everyone knows you as an action hero, I will break it. I became a romantic hero, I will break it with a comedy, and then I will break it with a commercial film. I enjoy doing that. And exploring is fun. The reason we become actors is that we would like to explore these [different kinds of genres]. It's the excitement of new challenges, which usually doesn't come if you're doing the same role or same genre, just because it works."

While Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota premiered at Toronto Film Festival 2018 followed by a big-screen release in 2019, Meenakshi Sundareshwar was a Netflix Original. While he is yet to fully experience the theatrical release, he acknowledges that OTT has given a lot of opportunities to people and their work can be seen in many ways. When asked whether he has sort of realized the impact of theatres vs OTT, he says, "I'm not the right person to answer this, because I've had only two films. Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota was more of an international film where we had audiences from all over the world before we had an audience in India, right. So that experience I mean, that film didn't release on OTT, before we got the recognition all over the world. Whereas Meenakshi Sundareshar was always a Netflix original film. So to be honest, I haven't really gotten the theater experience. So I won't be able to compare it with the reach of having a theater release with having an OTT release. If I need to understand and break it down in the sense of it, OTT has really opened up a huge avenue or not even an avenue it's like a highway for creating content and the way the audience is consuming the content is ridiculously amazing. It wasn't expected to boom, like it did three years or five years back. Having said that, the kind of audience that goes to a theater will always be someone who can take out the time of three hours dedicated, spend a lot of money, and experience something that they can hold back. So I think the theater audience will always have a wider reach. But the OTT just elevates a theater release, because then you have it on theater, and then you have it on OTT, so you get the best of both worlds."

"I'm really happy for the writers, technicians, and that part of the industry who don't get the recognition are getting it now. Now, you're noticing the cinematography, the background score; you're noticing the audience has become very educated about these things. I'm really happy that their talent is in the light and they're getting the respect and the popularity that they deserve," he adds.

On the work front, Abhimanyu Dassani has two films releasing this year - a family entertainer Aankh Micholi starring Mrunal Thakur, Paresh Rawal, Sharman Joshi, Divya Dutta, Abhishek Banerjee, Darshan Jariwala, Grusha Kapoor, and Vijay Raaz. Another project is Nikamma starring Shilpa Shetty and Shirley Setia.