Danish Pandor’s first meeting itself with filmmaker Aditya Dhar marked the beginning of his prep to become Uzair Baloch in Dhurandhar. Grateful to find a place in the Ranveer Singh, Akshaye Khanna, Sanjay Dutt, R Madhavan, and Arjun Rampal-starrer, the actor knew he would have to be armed with intense prep to play the real-life Pakistani gangster. “Aditya sir had done five to six years of research. He gave me the research material, which included videos of Uzair Baloch,” he recalls.
As Pandor watched Baloch’s interviews, he understood that the key to embracing the character lay in perfecting the dialect prevalent among the Baloch population in Karachi. “I went through all the interviews available on YouTube. In Karachi, people speak Urdu with a touch of Punjabi. I worked with a dialect coach to perfect that,” he shares. Closer to the shoot, the director conducted a 20-day workshop to ease them into the dialect. “All of us — Ranveer bhai, Sara [Arjun], and Rakesh sir [Bedi] — needed to have the same twang when our characters conversed with each other.”
Things Danish Pandor learnt from Ranveer Singh:
“He makes everyone feel so important. Secondly, his dedication towards his craft and concentrating on his work [is remarkable]. Also, in our one-and-a-half year journey, I never saw his spirits dim.”