Vedang Raina plays a character facing a brutal prison sentence in his next film, Jigra. For the film, the young actor had to shoot some emotionally intense scenes. In a new interview with Mansworld India, Vedang revealed how shooting those scenes started to impact his mental health. Jigra marks his second film as an actor. (Also read: Vedang Raina exclusive interview: ‘I am still getting used to being in the limelight’)

What Vedang said

During the interview, Vedang shared his experience shooting Jigra and said, “Alia [Bhatt] would be in the scene, hit all the right notes with precision and get out of the character as soon as she hears ‘cut’. But I couldn’t, it is not easy for me to come in and out of character. It did impact my mental health a bit. On the very first day, I was to shoot a rather emotionally intense scene, and I shut myself in my vanity, put the lights off, switched off my phone, and told people to just leave me alone—I sat there listening to my music. Now, as luck would have it, the shot was supposed to happen at 3pm but got delayed and we started rolling around 8 pm. So, I was in that self-imposed solitary confinement for about 8 long hours, and it really started impacting me.”

‘It is not worth it’

He went on to add, “Even when the scenes were done, I couldn’t get out of that zone for 2/3 hours. I realised that it is not going to work like this, and after that I have decided not to put myself through such a thing… it is not worth it and I believe there are other ways to access that emotion, I just need to find which one works for me the best.”

In Jigra, Alia Bhatt and Vedang play siblings. Alia plays a young woman, Satya Anand, who struggles to save her brother Ankur Anand, who is being tortured while being imprisoned in a foreign jail. Satya pledges to break Ankur out from the prison after he is sentenced to death. It is directed by Vasan Bala.

Jigra releases in theatres on October 11.