• There was one of your roles, in Everybody Says I'm Fine.

Oh, that was horrible.

• How do you get the link between the lingo, the diction, the accent right? A director can't teach you that, you've got to pick it up.

The recordings, you listen to them over and over again and then you forget about them, because then, what you are doing is not concentrating on the character, and if you're not doing that, nobody cares about your accent. Did you serve the story well playing this character? That's the issue, not whether you served the story well with the right accent.

• Did you call it (the character you play in Lagey Raho Munnabhai) a hard-soft character?

It was a hard-soft character, more hard than soft.

• His business requires he looks like a dada, who does not fear anybody. In fact, everyone fears him. He pulled out a gun, but deep down, you know he's a father, he runs a family.

Yes, and I think that Diya Mirza, when we first connected with each other, I asked her, 'What were the things you did with your father?' And she said, 'I always give him a neck massage.' I said, 'That's strange, because when I come home, I give my hand to one son and my leg to another and they give me a bit of a massage.' She started massaging me the first time we met. . . it may have appeared for a fleeting moment in the film, but it serves the film because it creates wonderful proximity.

... contd.