Abhishek Bachchan’s next has him play Bob Biswas, a character from Sujoy Ghosh’s Kahaani, who is getting a spin-off film. For Bob Biswas, Abhishek had to go through the tough ordeal of putting on weight to look the part. Unlike many actors, Abhishek didn’t want to use CGI or prosthetics to look the part and instead went all out to put on oodles of weight to look and feel like Bob. In an exclusive conversation with India Today, Abhishek spoke about the mental process of becoming Bob Biswas and why he was adamant about putting on weight to look the part.

Excerpts from the conversation:

Tell us about the mental transformation you went through to play Bob Biswas.

It was a tough and deep dark tunnel to be very honest. Bob has lost his memory, so everything is fair game. There are no dos and don’ts. So, this was the process of basically rediscovering a person altogether. Even emotionally you know it is a daunting task for anybody to wake up from a coma and not remember anything and if they come to know you have a beautiful wife and two beautiful children and is very happy, settled middle-class life and then suddenly your past catches up with you which is a complete opposite and a complete contradiction of the life that you lead and the life that you started enjoying and loving. So, then to deal with this moral dilemma that ‘wait I don’t want to do this but I have to do this’, ‘I don’t know what is going on’ and so to find your feet amongst all this. It throws up so many questions and so many emotions that it makes Bob as a character so interesting to play.

How easy is it to let go or switch off from a character once the film is done? Does a part of the character stay with you?

A part of the character always stays on with you because you invest so much of your personal thing into the character. Something or the other always stays on, something or the other.

So what is it about Bob that has stayed on with you?

His weight!

Did the option of wearing a bodysuit or prosthetics ever cross your mind?

Yes, that is something that Sujoy (Ghosh) and Diya (Annapurna Ghosh) wanted to explore first. I was dead against it. We did try it on to just you know, I like to give everybody a fair opportunity. I said I will try it. I wasn’t happy with it because of the lack of movement. When you put a prosthetic stomach, it is very inanimate. And you look fake somewhere. I believe today your audience wants to see an actor being completely authentic with the material that they have. They want to see the actor really jump in with both two feet and to really go for. And they are very quick to point out when they do something like cheating like this. They pick up on it. So, I mean that’s the kind of actor I have been, it is the kind of work I prefer to do. I did it in Guru 14-15 years ago, I did it for Bob, I put on a bit of weight for Big Bull because the role required it. But for Bob I had to push it to another level. I became between 100-105 kilos during the shoot. And if you see Bob’s face, the face changes when it is round and his cheeks fill up. When you do prosthetics on the cheeks it looks like a prosthetic. So, the stomach moves in a different way. When you have that weight and you are physically carrying that weight your entire performance changes because your body language changes your weight, your movement, your walk, your run, everything changes you know.