Bollywood: How Shah Rukh Khan perfected his famous line ‘K k k..Kiran’ in ‘Darr’
A new Netflix series on Yash Raj Films casts light on the actor’s efforts
Called ‘The King of Romance’, Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan is famous for playing romantic roles over the decades, including in ‘DDLJ’, ‘Dil Toh Pagal Hai’ and ‘Mohabbatein’, among others.
Prior to becoming a romantic, he was the quintessential villain. In Yash Chopra’s directorial ‘Darr’ (1993), also starring Juhi Chawla and Sunny Deol, Khan played the role of a murderous stalker.
The film’s story revolved around Rahul (Khan) who is obsessively in love with his classmate Kiran (Chawla) and stalks her.
The film, however, is remembered to this date for Khan’s “I Love You K.K.K... Kiran!” line, which has also cemented its place in pop-culture history.
In Netflix’s recent docu-series ‘The Romantics’, Khan takes a stroll down memory lane and shared how he perfected that stammer.
“I had a classmate who had a stammer and then we did some little study, some BBC documentary where they talked about that people’s minds become aware to one sound, and it’s like a sharp current,” Khan said in the documentary. “So, you can’t say the word because you become aware of a sound. Let’s make him aware of the woman he loves the most, her name. So, I only stammer on the word Kiran. It was just for that one word because he’s so aware of her.”
“I had some really fantastically stupid ideas, like I remember once going to Adi (Aditya Chopra) and saying, can I make this phone call hanging upside down? Adi said ‘Dad won’t allow that.’ Sometimes he would come and tell me that 'listen I think dad is not going to take a close up of this. I think you did very well. So, you suggest, if I do it, he’ll turn me down'. So, we were like the filters who kind of help each other with Yash Ji,” he added.
‘The Romantics’ is Smriti Mundhra’s directorial. It celebrates the legacy of the late filmmaker Yash Chopra. It features 35 leading personalities of the Hindi-language film industry and dives into the history of Bollywood through the lens of the Yash Raj Films over the past 50 years.