"Chhichhore has been my toughest film so far," begins Tahir Raj Bhasin, who knows the worth of a Nitesh Tiwari film on an actor's resume. Thrilled as he is to have earned a place in the filmmaker's campus caper, the actor acknowledges that it wasn't an easy process to become Derek, one of the principal characters in the Sushant Singh Rajput and Shraddha Kapoor starrer. What made it all the more daunting was that the character is based on one of Tiwari's closest friends from IIT Bombay.

"I had to become supremely fit to look the part of a college athlete," explains Bhasin, informing that Derek was written as the star athlete who wins laurels for the college. "Along with acing different forms of sports, I also had to balance the emotional graph of my part. Combining the two drained me."