First, never mind what you heard. Hollywood superstar Will Smith, who was in Mumbai over the weekend and familiarly fraternizing with the stars of Bollywood, has not shot a cameo for Dharma Productions’ upcoming romcom sequel Student of The Year 2 as is being widely speculated.
The actor, who was last seen in the 2017 Netflix fantasy crime drama Bright, instead got Karan Johar to direct and shoot him dancing to Shreya Ghoshal’s perky number Radha from Dharma Productions’ 2012 film that launched the Bollywood careers of Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Siddharth Malhotra – Student of The Year. Yes, that’s what Will was shooting for yesterday in Mumbai.
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As to why Will wanted to dance to the bubbly Bollywood track and get nobody other than the prolific filmmaker KJo to shoot it for him, there is a story. It seems the Hollywood actor wanted this episode for The Bucket List video series he has on his newly-launched YouTube channel. The channel that went live in December 2017 already has over 1.8 million subscribers and 30.8 million views.
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The actor, best known for such colossal Hollywood hits as Independence Day, the Men In Black franchise, I am Legend and The Pursuit of Happyness, said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in Delhi on Friday that “one of the things on his bucket list is to be in a Bollywood dance number”.
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Will made that admission to Farhan Akhtar with whom he had a chat session at the HT Leadership Summit. He got to strike that one off his bucket list the very next day when he visited Karan’s SOTY 2 set at Chitrakoot Grounds in Andheri where Dharma Productions was shooting its own song for the film featuring Tiger Shroff, Tara Sutaria and Ananya Pandey.
The Academy Award nominee and Grammy Award winner has been facing his biggest fears in The Bucket List and has said, “A lot of people have a wrong perspective of failure. You fail, you correct and then you win. I’ve been lucky enough to embrace failure. I started to develop an ability to get over and embrace the lesson. You learn more from your failures than your successes.”
For the debut of the video series, Will overcame his great fear of the ocean by attempting scuba diving. Then for his 50th birthday on September 25, he completed a daring bungee jump from a helicopter over the Grand Canyon in Arizona which he streamed live on his YouTube channel. Both of which, he might admit, are child’s play compared to dancing under Karan Johar’s direction to Radha!