Manisha Koirala recently revisited her experiences working on the iconic 1998 film Dil Se, starring alongside Shah Rukh Khan under the direction of Mani Ratnam. Set against the backdrop of insurgency in Assam, the film featured Koirala in a challenging role as a female terrorist with a tragic love story interwoven. In a recent interview with ANI, she shared insights into how the film’s ending was originally conceived—and how it changed at the last minute.
Reflecting on her decision to play a complex character, Manisha said, “I was supposed to do a film with Ram Gopal Verma, and then this came to me. They had other people in mind, and it came to me later. As an artist, I wanted to explore areas that I had never explored.” She elaborated on how Mani Ratnam’s vision shaped her portrayal, “He didn’t want me to play it typically. I had to be like a normal girl, but still show her pain and anger going beyond reason.”
The most striking revelation was the original ending that had been agreed upon during the script phase. “In the original script that we had agreed on, the cause was larger than love for both the characters. He lets her die, and that was agreeable to all of us, but they changed it last minute,” Koirala said. This shift brought a different emotional arc to the finale. In the final cut, Shah Rukh Khan’s character, Amar, tries to stop Manisha’s character, Meghna, but ends up perishing with her in a dramatic embrace, symbolizing an overwhelming sacrifice driven by love.
Manisha shared that she initially preferred the original ending because it underscored the impossibility of their union. She said, ““In the final version, everybody was trying to achieve that his love was so intense for her, and at the same time he couldn’t allow her to go for it, nor allow to live without her. He stops her but dies in that, they were trying to show it as his big sacrifice, the original script didn’t have that. Back then only I had liked the original because there was no way they would have become one. Sometimes unrequited love is more interesting than a completed loved story.”
