How Bollywood polished Mahira Khan's dancing skills

When Mahira Khan had bagged a spot beside Shah Rukh Khan for their upcoming movie Raees, we all knew it was not only a lucrative opportunity for the actress but that she would also gain a lot of experience from the Indian film industry. During a recent interview, she spilled the beans on how people there had told her to ‘dance like nobody is watching’.

“I have danced in the two films I have recently done, but I danced in Ho Mann Jahaan after I came back [from Bollywood] so you see a vast difference between the first film Bin Roye and Ho Mann Jahaan,I” she said. Mahira also spoke about how she had danced well to the Asrar song Shakar Wandan from Ho Mann Jahaan. According to Mahira, she had danced better to Shakar Wandan since she had learned a lot from the cast of Raees on how to dance.

“[The song] ‘Shakar Wandaan Re’ became very popular, and you see a lot of difference [in my dancing]. I danced khul ke [with abandon], and the credit goes to the choreographers in India, my director, Shah Rukh,” she said.

And here’s the valuable advice they gave her, which helped her to polish her dancing skills.

“They kept telling me ‘Just do it, just forget who’s watching!’. We’re not [like that]. Apart from our theatre, drama acting is focused up here [gestures towards face], so we’ve mastered the art of the closeup. We give the right expressions, we cry well, we do confrontations well, but when it comes to body language… you are constricted and cinema is not that,” she said.

Dancing wasn’t all that the actress learned while on the sets of Raees. She did learn a few words in Gujrati.

“I didn’t speak Gujrati too much, one line and a few words here and there,” she shared, but one of the words stuck in her memory was ‘dafor’, the Gujrati word for ‘idiot’,” she said.