NEW DELHI: Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh, who will soon be seen portraying Kapil Dev, captain of the 1983 cricket World Cup-winning team, in the upcoming sports biopic ‘83’, delved into the intricacies of portraying the character for the big screen.
Helmed by director Kabir Khan, ‘83’ revolves around India’s historical 1983 cricket World Cup win. Talking about his role, the ‘Padmaavat’ actor stated that bowling like Kapil was the most difficult aspect of his character development. Ranveer said, “He has a very unique bowling action and his bio-mechanics are very unique to him. My body is very different from his so I had to transform my physicality drastically in order to achieve it. It took a long time, in fact, months to perfect the action. Initially, my body was too heavy because I was coming off of the shoot of ‘Simmba’.”
He further spoke about Balwinder Singh Sandhu, the legend of the 83-world cup who was also Ranveer’s coach and said, “Our coach noticed that my body was too heavy and he said jab tu run-up mein aata hai toh tu aisa lagta hai ki pehelwan bowling karne aa raha hai. And he sent me away for a month just to change my physicality to bring it closer to Kapil’s athleticism and then once I did that, I started making some headway.”