Veteran Bollywood actor Paresh Rawal recently shared his experience of taking over and completing late actor Rishi Kapoor’s role in the 2022 drama, ‘Sharmaji Namkeen’.

In an interview with The Times of India, Rawal spoke about the challenge of filling in Kapoor’s shoes but not “destroying” the character that the latter had built. 

“The challenge for me was what Rishi saab had done, I should not be destroying that. Whatever he has sawed, without vandalising that, I need to carry it forward in a subtle way. In short, it was a relay race that I had to complete. These were the thoughts in my mind while I signed the film. And when I sat with them, it suddenly struck me that this is for the first time something like this is happening in Bollywood the same character is played by two different actors. So slowly it started unfolding and I started to realise the recuperations of the decision. So ultimately I was shouldering a bigger responsibility,” Rawal said. 

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“What I feel bad for Rishi ji is… the way he started enjoying acting in his second innings was unmatchable. He gave some wonderful films like Kapoor and Sons, Rajma Chawal, 102 Not Out… and during such a period, a film like Sharmaji Namkeen came which he could not complete. So as an actor I can feel the pain of not completing such a film that was shot halfway by another actor,” the 66-year-old actor said, adding that he can empathize with Kapoor’s trauma of undergoing cancer, “an illness that obviously makes a person think about whether he will survive or not.”

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Rishi Kapoor, who began shooting for Sharmaji Namkeen’ in 2020, succumbed to his two-year-long battle with leukemia at the age of 69. After his death, Paresh Rawal was asked to fill in and complete the second half of the film.