Drishyam The Conclusion was nearly derailed before it even went on floors — and the inside story of how it survived is almost as dramatic as the film itself.
When Akshaye Khanna walked out of the project at the last minute, Jaideep Ahlawat stepped in just days before the shoot. But director Abhishek Pathak didn’t simply slot a new actor into the old part. He rewrote the entire screenplay.
“We were just a week or 10 days away from my first schedule, which I was shooting in Mumbai. The set was ready. We had to take a call and change the character completely,” Pathak revealed in an exclusive interview with Bollywood Hungama. “We have not just changed the casting but also the character. I was not comfortable with the same character being played by a different actor. Hence, I rewrote the entire screenplay.”
Pathak wrote the new role specifically around Ahlawat’s strengths, making sure it wouldn’t feel like a retread of anything audiences had seen in Drishyam 2 (2022). “Sometimes, when you do this kind of stuff under pressure, the result comes out very nicely,” he said, crediting Ahlawat for being accommodating and sorting out his dates at the eleventh hour.
The trailer’s scenes between Ajay Devgn and Jaideep Ahlawat have already been widely loved, and Pathak sees the upheaval as a happy accident: “Kuch alag hota hai toh maza aa jaata hai. You can’t keep watching the same character. Once you have a new character, you have new ground to play on.”
There’s more star power in the mix too. Prakash Raj joins the franchise as an elegant, high-profile lawyer — reuniting with Ajay Devgn on screen for the first time since their Singham (2011) showdown.
Earlier, Pathak also revealed why the film was retitled from Drishyam 3 to Drishyam The Conclusion — and that Mohanlal himself called Ajay Devgn after the trailer launch to say he really liked it.
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