Actor Kangana Ranaut who is fighting to get justice for the late actor Sushant Singh Rajput admits that she has never met him in person. She further added that she feels a different kind of connection with him which is enough for her to fight for him.
“Sushant and I, we never really crossed paths. But we were always really close, you know,” she told The Times of India, adding that he might have attended one of her birthday parties, but she didn’t speak to him. She said that she used to get updates from his ex-girlfriend Ankita Lokhande who dated him for 6 years. Ankita then worked with Kangana in historical epic Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi.
She said that her Manikarnika producer, Kamal Jain, worked with Sushant on the MS Dhoni biopic. He would tell her that both of them were a lot like each other. “Every now and then, he used to talk about Sushant. When I was learning horse riding, he used to say that he organised the training for Sushant also,” she said, mentioning a time when they didn’t meet because she had arrived at Kamal Jain’s office just after he’d left. “There was some kind of connection, but nothing direct,” she said.
“See, I don’t want to be standing on some high ground and be like, I always knew Sushant. No, I did not. And to be honest, when I would read these blinds after blinds, news after news that he is a rapist, he is a sex addict, he is doing drugs, he is beating up his directors, I remember thinking vaguely, ‘What is up with this boy? He needs to get control of his life.’” she said. She admitted that her perspective changed after she learned more about him. She was convinced that Sushant was systematically boycotted from the industry because of few powerful people.
She also added that whatever she talks about isn’t something Sushant told her personally but it is her collective perception and is based on what she hears. “I want to be very honest. I can’t say that Sushant came and told me all this but I gathered my perception of him and I understood that he was trapped,” she said.
