Hansie cronje is coming to Mumbai — five years after he died in an air crash, seven years after his fall from grace.

In the last week of October, a South African film crew from Cape Town will land in Mumbai to shoot the final schedule of Hansie, the movie, which is being produced by the former South African cricket captain’s elder brother, Frans Cronje.

“We will be there for a week at the end of October and the first few days of November. We will shoot some of the cricket action, Hansie’s first visit to Mother Teresa (it happened for real in Kolkata in the early 1990s), the bookies making contact with Hansie, and his struggles to get rid of them,” Frans reveals in an email to The Indian Express.

No, Mohammed Azharuddin will not figure in the $8-million movie, nor will Mukesh Gupta — Hansie had told match-fixing investigators after the scandal in 2001 that the former Indian captain had introduced him to Gupta, a leading bookie at that time.

“We have used actors for the entire movie and no cricketers play themselves. We will use fictional names for the bookies. We will use Indian actors, but are still waiting to confirm them,” writes Frans, who heads Global Creative Studios, an award-winning production house in Cape Town.

Francois Rautenbach, a South African actor, will play Hansie and Sarah Thompson, a TV star from the US, will play the vital role of wife Bertha, who is now remarried.

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