Actor Gurmeet Choudhary earned a lot of praise when he appeared as Lord Ram in NDTV Imagine’s Ramayana. The reason behind Gurmeet’s focus on his journey in television rather than on films was late filmmaker Yash Chopra.
Gurmeet fondly remembered the late director and talked about he met the filmmaker when he was new in Mumbai. Gurmeet said that he found Yash Chopra’s mobile number and called him from his landline. Surprisingly, the director answered his phone call and called him the next day to his office.
“I told him that I am an actor, wanted to meet him, and was a fan. He said, ‘Come to the YRF office, kid’.” Gurmeet remembered that the filmmaker was kind enough to give him the address because he didn’t even know where the YRF office was.
Gurmeet Choudhary recalled the advice that Yash Chopra gave him at the time. He said, “It is because of him that I have reached here today. I still remember his advice. He said, ‘If you want to become a film actor, then do TV. Become such a big star on television, that producers and directors cast you in films from there, how it had happened with Shah Rukh.’ He gave me Shah Rukh Khan’s example. So that got stuck in my head because someone like Yash Chopra was giving me that advice. Since then, I took TV very seriously.”
Gurmeet said that this advice by the late director worked very well for him because of his work on television, he ultimately got his break in Bollywood. The actor said that director Mukesh Bhatt approached him for a film only because his wife had seen his work on television show.
“It is because of him that I have reached this position. He showed me the path. If I had only been preparing for films, then I wouldn’t have made it. Television showed me my path, it made me wiser,” the actor added while remembering the late director.
