Soon after watching Mulk, Ayushmann Khurrana approached director Anubhav Sinha to express his admiration for the way he highlighted the issue of stereotyping Muslims in the wake of a terror attack. Offering himself as a prospective actor for his future project, Khurrana — who has delivered only box-office successes over the past few years — had the director revisit a half-written script. As this script finally makes it to the big screen, the actor, in an interview with mid-day, talks of working on his "first serious film", Article 15, reportedly based on the Badaun Case [gangrape and murder of two teenage girls in UP that CBI concluded as suicide].

Tell us about your initial discussion with Anubhav Sinha on the film, and your subsequent casting in it.
He had called me for a rom-com. I had watched his last film, Mulk, and loved it. It says things in such a different way. So, I told him I wanted to do something like that, and asked him what [scripts] he had. He narrated this one and I was hooked. This is socially relevant, and we've not seen a film based on the caste system that says things as they simply are. He was intrigued by the fact that I read about this issue; about caste system and human scavenging. I had seen a documentary called India Untouched four years ago. It is so intriguing. Anubhav had seen the material too. He told me he was trying to find an actor who could relate to these things, and feel for them. So he said we should do this film and developed the script further.