Actor Sushmita Sen recently made her much-awaited comeback with Disney+Hotstar series Aarya. Choreographer Ganesh Hegde in an interview recalled how the actress had once refused to lip-sync suggestive lyrics in the famous song ‘Mehboob Mere’. He further stated that because Sushmita was so adamant music composer Anu Malik had to rewrite those subsequent lines.
In an interview with HuffPost, Hegde said, “There was a line that went ‘aa garmi le mere seene se and she refused to sing it. Composer Anu Malik had to change the lines to ‘aa narmi le mere aankhon se,’ because she said, ‘I won’t just do it’.”
Sushmita’s Mehboob Mere was one of the most popular songs in Fiza. “It was unheard of at that point of time, to command and extract that kind of respect,” Hegde said. The song was performed by Sunidhi Chauhan and Karsan Sargathiya.
“She dominated the screen. I knew that from the first time I choreographed her for a stage performance, and unlike what we did with most actors, we let her dance alone on the stage to Sting’s Desert Rose. It’s a gamble on a massive stage like that, but I knew Sushmita could hold the stage down all by herself,” the choreographer said, noting how Sushmita changed the way people perceived ‘item numbers’.
“But then, there is nothing usual about her. A lot of the dancing, especially the belly dancing moves, she did herself. There’s a trance-like feel to her dancing and in those sequences, I did not do anything. It was mostly her,” he further added. Sushmita, he said has always been very particular about how she projected herself on screen.
The actress received critical and audience acclaim for her role in Aarya, where she is seen taking control of her family’s criminal empire.