Don't regret having not played Gandhi: Naseeruddin Shah

Naseeruddin Shah, who had auditioned for the lead role in Richard Attenborough's 'Gandhi', has no regrets over not been selected to enact the iconic character.
When Shah learnt about Attenborough's prospective film, he didn't give much of a thought to the possibility of playing the role as he was 14 then. But when the iconic British director was to visit Mumbai in the late 1970s, Shah thought the prospect was worth pursuing this time.
"My aim, however, was not to play Gandhi. I just wanted to be a star in an international project. I dreamt of playing Zorro. So I have no regrets that Gandhi's role finally went to Ben Kingsley," 64-year-old Shah told PTI in an interview.

"I regret that I am not an international star like Ben Kingsley. But then if I had got the role what would have become of Ben Kingsley," he says in a lighter vein.
But he feels he was "not enough skilled at that time as Ben to have pulled it off the way he did."
However, he says that it is a "pungent irony" that in his entire career, this is one role which he went after and it eluded him completely.

When Shah was in London auditioning for the role, there were reports in the media back home that an Indian has been chosen for the role of Gandhi.

"I later deducted that Ben had in fact already been cast as Gandhi and this whole process of tom-tomming all of us being tested and sneaking the news to the press in India that I had been chosen was a masquerade conducted to pre-empt objections that inevitably would have arisen if a white actor were announced straightway," Shah writes in his 'And Then One Day,' which was released recently.
The actor says that the response his book, a candid recount of almost four decades of his life, has received so far astonishes him.
"I did not expect such a warm reaction. The writing field has embraced me and it feels very good. I was expecting it to be patronised and condescended. I feel very thrilled. I do not consider myself as a writer. I have no vanity about it. I have written it as the way I felt it should be written," he says.