Late actor Irrfan Khan famously turned down a job in a Steven Spielberg film in which he would have co-starred with Scarlett Johansson. He shared these data in a previous interaction. Irrfan passed away on April 29, 2020, after a two-year struggle with a neuroendocrine tumour.

According to rumours from 2016, Irrfan turned down a Steven Spielberg project starring Scarlett Johansson. The actor himself acknowledged that he declined the job because he didn’t believe it had any ‘scope’ for him.

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Back then, he told NDTV, “I didn’t feel the character offered to me gave me much scope. So I said ‘No’; though Scarlett Johansson is an actor I would have loved to share screen space with.”

Later that year, in an interview with the Hindustan Times, Irrfan explained, “Saying that I said a ‘no’ to a certain filmmaker is very crude and a very uncouth way of understanding or portraying things,” he stated.

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According to the source, in addition to Spielberg, other notable names whose films Irrfan has turned down include Ridley Scott. He also declined Christopher Nolan‘s masterwork Interstellar, which was released in 2014. “I don’t take pride in such things (saying no) and it’s a dream to work with someone like Steven Spielberg. I think that more than anything else, I am disappointed that I could not work with him. But, if I don’t find something interesting for myself, something that inspires me I don’t think I will be the right choice to do it,” he continued.

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In 1995, Irrfan married his National School of Drama classmate Sutapa Sikdar, and the couple had two boys, Babil and Ayan. After participating in various television series, the actor made his feature film debut in Mira Nair’s Academy Award-winning 1988 film Salaam Bombay! Angrezi Medium, Irrfan’s final film, was released just a few weeks before his death in April 2020.