Actress Kareena Kapoor claimed that she was more worried about the film Tashan, which she was working on concurrently, than she was about how influential the movie Jab We Met would be for her when it was being made. Even the film’s director Imtiaz Ali, according to Kareena, must have been certain that she was missing the enchantment of the moment.
Kareena said in a recent interview with mid-day that Shahid Kapoor was the one Imtiaz first approached, and that the movie’s original working title was Geet, after the character she would later portray. Considering it to be just another movie when she agreed to work on it, she thought nothing of it while working on Jab We Met.
But as luck would have it, Jab We Met emerged as her most memorable film, while Tashan bombed spectacularly. “I didn’t even manifest it. I was actually without work for a year and a half, because I was saying no to films; I wasn’t getting the kind of films that I wanted… I never knew it would be this iconic movie. Even Imtiaz always looked at me like, ‘You’re not understanding what this character is, you don’t know what you’re doing’,” Kareena said.
And she didn’t catch on even during filming. “I was like, ‘What is this Geet? I’m coming with Tashan, it’s going to blow the world away’, which it did, but it wasn’t that movie, it was this. Throughout shooting Jab We Met, all I did was talk about Tashan. Imtiaz must’ve really thought, ‘She has no idea’. And that’s what worked. I actually had no idea.”
Jab We Met, which was released in 2007, has become an enduring hit. However, it also signaled the end of Shahid and Kareena’s romance. After meeting Saif Ali Khan at Tashan, she eventually began dating him, and the two got married in 2012. The actor Bobby Deol provided a different description of what transpired in a 2017 interview with HuffPost. He insisted that he was the one who approached Imtiaz with the idea for Jab We Met and that he had advised Imtiaz to think about casting Kareena as the female protagonist. He claimed that Shahid was put in his place by Kareena.