Ranveer Singh has already spoken out about how deeply he was affected by playing the cruel and ruthless Alauddin Khilji in Padmaavat. Now he shares more details about his struggle to snap out of the darkness of the character in real life…

“I really thought I was going crazy. I felt like I was losing my marbles. A really strange incident happened off camera, on the set. Somebody made a mistake and I turned towards that person and I was gonna attack, physically assault that person as Alauddin Khilji. I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, a second. This is not f***ing real. This sh** is going deep down.’ Because suddenly my instinctive reaction was that of the character’s and not mine.”
He reasons, “The thing was I had isolated myself during the shooting process as well. I was going to the set in the morning, playing Alauddin all day and then sleeping whenever I slept. And going and being Alauddin again. Doing that for enough days on end, too much of it for too long, I was suddenly generating ill-feelings, harbouring negative and evil thoughts.”

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It reached a point where he became a stranger to himself. “Once, I looked into the mirror and I had an outer body experience. I was thinking certain things, I was alone at home and I happened to walk by a mirror and there was this look on my face and I couldn’t recognize myself. I had never seen my face look like that. It was really strange.”

According to Ranveer, he had poured so much into the character and it came at a cost… “During and between shoot days, I was shooting from 9 am to 9 pm, and after that, there used to be the hangover. Like until 4-5am in the morning, I was still reeling under what I had done. Even between shoot days, those waves of thoughts would suddenly come up and it was damn hard to snap out of it. I was constantly experiencing a character hangover to the point I thought I was losing myself to this character. And that was very scary for me.”

The minute they called wrap and the cake was cut, he cut Khilji out of his system. “I was never Alauddin for even a second (after wrap-up),” he reveals. And thank god for that!