Liger maker breaks down how the team pursued Mike Tyson through the pandemic and finally shot with the boxing legend in his Las Vegas home’s backyard
Vijay Deverakonda with Mike Tyson
Liger was originally envisioned as a south film — to be made in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada — with Vijay Deverakonda in the lead. But when the final draft of the script landed on the table, the leading man, director Puri Jagannadh and producer Charmme Kaur instinctively knew that it had the potential to be bigger. Deverakonda got in touch with Karan Johar, who soon came on board, and the film quickly graduated to a pan-India project. Of course, the biggest scale-up happened when boxing legend Mike Tyson agreed to be a part of the actioner, also starring Ananya Panday.
Casting the boxing heavyweight was a long process, says Kaur. “It took us two years to sign him on,” she smiles. She began the discussion with his legal and managing teams in 2019. “We sealed the deal after months of numerous Zoom calls. And then, COVID-19 happened. India was in the red zone. Tyson’s teams told me it’s a deal-breaker. They didn’t want to travel all the way to India, and we couldn’t have travelled [to the US] either. It was heartbreaking [that things fell apart].”
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Charmme Kaur
But Deverakonda, Jagannadh and Kaur were not quite ready to throw in the towel. When the situation improved after the first wave, Kaur resumed the conversation with Tyson’s teams in late 2020. “I again got hold of everyone. I made calls at 5 am IST. This went on for a year, after which Mike Tyson said, ‘Fine. Come to my backyard and shoot.’ We created [a small] team and went to shoot in Las Vegas for a month.”
Shooting with the legend was the easiest part of the process. The producer describes him as “a kid on the set.” “He is at peace with his life. His wife Kiki Tyson is amazing, and was always on the set with us. He is a family guy. After every shot, he’d ask Puri sir if the shot was okay. Whenever Puri sir said it was amazing, he would jump around in childlike glee, saying, ‘I am an actor!’ He loves Indian food. One day, he told me, ‘I want to eat chicken tikka masala with garlic naan and gobhi.’ So that was our staple order every day.”
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