Acting and dancing sensation Shantanu Maheshwari is all set to make a fiery comeback with his second digital show ‘Medically Yourrs’ on ALTBalaji.
The show which sheds light on the lives of medical students and the struggles they have to face to get through all their hardships, will showcase Shantanu as Abir Basu, the central character of the show who has a complicated personality with a very angry side to him.
As part of his angry and complexed natured character, Shantanu is also shown to be smoking quite a lot on the show, for which he actually had to smoke cigarettes to bring in realness to the scenes.
Shantanu had even developed a slight throat infection which increased even more whilst smoking for the scenes, to the extent where he was coughing profusely, not only while shooting but even for a few weeks after the shoot was over! But being the thorough professional, Shantanu completed each of the scenes with the cigarette in his mouth to keep the realness of it intact! “I had to smoke cigarettes for quite a few scenes in the show. While preparing for the character, smoking initially was quite tough for me as it was the very first time I was putting a cigarette in my mouth. But the scene required me to do it, and it was important for me to live up to my character’s essence, so I pushed myself to do the best I could! It increased the throat infection that I had caught onto and made it, even more, worse than it was over those couple of weeks, and there isn’t even one scene where I haven’t coughed while smoking! But I decided that I had to complete them all in sync, to feel what my character was feeling.”
“While shooting these scenes, the one thing I realized is that for youngsters specially, it is very easy to get addicted to smoking as there is immense peer pressure these days to look cool and do things that others are doing, Also in our field there is always an endless wait between our shots while shooting.
So somehow the easiest way to kill time and distress is to have that cigarette in your hand! But when I took those first few puffs, it just didn’t feel healthy in and it made me feel quite dehydrated. So somehow I managed to restrict myself to only taking that cigarette in my hand for the scene, and not after that at all, which I am quite happy about”, says Shantanu signing off.