About Rab Ne…and his equation with the powers that be at Yash Raj Films, Khan says the secret of their glittering track record (Darr, DDLJ, Dil Toh Pagal Hai, Mohabbatein, Veer-Zaara and Chak De! India) is that they don’t question each other. “Somewhere Adi, Yashji and I have stopped working together. Whenever we decide to have fun together, we decide to make a film. I don’t think we’ve ever done a special shot or anything. We don’t impress, depress or question each other. There is seamlessness in this relationship which comes across on screen,” he says.

So when Adi decided to make Rab Ne…’s character an antithesis of their trademark protagonist, Khan was more than happy. “Like I told Adi, I’ve sold Raj’s exterior in so many films but now I’ll show his interior. In Rab Ne…, I’m showing you the machinery of Raj. For every Raj that you’ve seen and loved, whether he wears a leather jacket, rides a Harley or plays the violin, the inside of Raj is Surinder Sahni, my character in Rab Ne…, who is completely normal and nothing like a yuppie hero,” he says.

Khan is ambivalent towards his career-defining roles that have earned him sobriquets like eternal loverboy or king of romance. “I’m ok with Raj. I liked him earlier. I think he’s got older now. I can play Raj as a hockey coach or as Don. I can take him to any level,” he declares.

Brace your heart for more illusions to be broken. For all his romantic intensity and palat moments, Khan hates romantic films. “Neither do I like to watch romantic films nor do I like to act in them but like they say, what you dislike doing the most, you’ll keep doing the most,” he says. He also nixes the notion that he’s romantic off screen. “I’m none of what I do on screen and I’m all of it. I might have all the feelings of Tujhe dekha toh yeh jaana sanam but I won’t express it in a song to Gauri. That’s why I say that I’m a good actor because I’m not like this at all in real life. It takes a lot of shit to do all this,” he says.

... contd.