Bollywood star’s Hollywood debut: Amitabh Bachchan to appear in Great Gatsby

Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan will appear in his first Hollywood film alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in a new adaptation of classic novel The Great Gatsby, according to Warner Bros. Pictures.

The 68-year-old star of 1970s hits Sholay (Sparks) and Deewaar (Wall) joins DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan in Australian director Baz Luhrmann’s version of the 1925 novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Warner Bros. said in a statement from that shooting started this week and Bachchan will play Meyer Wolfsheim, a shadowy organized crime figure who helps the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby make his money.

Bachchan was in Australia last month, where most of the filming will take place, but he did not disclose on his daily blog whether the trip was to finalize his appearance.

Instead, he wrote cryptically on August 29 as he was about to return to India: “Time has been spent well and hopefully judiciously. Days ahead will tell us whether it was fruitful or not.”

The “Big B,” who has a fanatical following in India and among fans of Hindi-language cinema abroad, has starred in some 150 Bollywood films. In 2008, he released his first English-language film, The Last Lear.

Maguire, star of the Spider-Man franchise, plays Nick Carraway, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel, who comes to New York from the U.S. Midwest in 1922 to make his fortune.

DiCaprio plays the lead role of Jay Gatsby, while Britain’s Mulligan plays his lover, Carraway’s cousin, Daisy Buchanan.

The film is being made on a $150 million budget and due for release next year, according to the imdb.com website.

human rights says:

October 15, 2012 at 8:50 pm

should he not be in jail? he had a hand along with the dirty gandhi family in the 1984 genocide against sikhs