Chameli: At a time when none of her films was creating magic, Kareena bounced back with the role of a brash, hardened streetwalker. She played ‘Chameli’, a prostitute, in the film. She also received the Filmfare special award for Best Performance for this role that demanded a certain amount of crudeness.

Refugee: No film that followed ever captured Kareena’s radiant beauty and ethereal persona as ably as this. From her first glimpse on-screen when Abhishek Bachchan sees her splashing water on her face it was love at first sight between Kareena and the camera. Playing a girl scuttling across the border to Pakistan with her family, Kareena reminded us of the screen legends of yore like Nutan, Madhubala and Nargis.

Dev: Kareena, who played girl-next-door, Aaliya, in the film, won the Filmfare Critics Award in the Best Actress category for her hard-hitting act in this movie. Kareena’s powerful acting helped her create a space for herself after this film.

Omkara: The Indian adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello, has Kapoor Khan portraying the character of Desdemona. This power-packed performance by Kapoor Khan won her the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor (Female) that year. The film had received much appreciation both in India and abroad.

Heroine: In Madhur Bhandarkar’s Heroine, Kareena Kapoor Khan played the role of a female actor in the Indian film industry. Highlighting the highs and lows of a heroine’s career and personal life, the film outshined as a milestone in Kareena’s career. While the film wasn’t a huge success on box office, Kapoor Khan’s portrayal of Mahi Arora is one to watch.

Before his debut in Omkara, Deepak was a theatre actor who had struggled for years to land a role in Bollywood. He played the role of Rajan Tiwari.

Deepak calls Omkara his first big break and said “This was my first film, so when you’re a struggler and you are getting to work with such big directors, you want to give it your all, thinking, ‘kaam milege, main dikhaunga’. When you are offered such a great role, you also become so full of enthusiasm and want to do your best, so there is a kind of truthfulness in your performance because you have struggled so much to be a part of something like this.”

Speaking further about the movie, he added that Vishal Bhardwaj is a magician. The way he makes his actors perform makes his films timeless classics. He involves himself with his cast and crew and the story. If everybody is in sync, one would realise how Vishal Ji, as a magician, will bring out the kind of performance from you that you’ve never thought you would do. He will leave you surprised. We had some of the most commercial actors in Omkara, but today, all you see are the characters of the story. Vishal Ji can create magic every time he sits on a director’s chair, or even with his music. I learnt to act like an actual human on screen from Vishal ji, I am not an actor when on set.”

In a conversation with another news portal, Actor Vivek Oberoi who played the role of Keshav in the movie said he is an actor who is more into perception and content. I had read a quote in film school that said “There are no small roles, only small actors, and that stuck. If I hadn’t played the role of Keshav Upadhyay, I’d have felt like I missed something,”

He further added: “It was an amazing experience. Vishal Bhai and I have always had a great equation and we were looking to collaborate on doing something together. I loved what he had done in Maqbool (2004) and Makdi (2002). He called me one day and said he was planning to make a film on the play Othello. I went over to hang out and he told me the basic story,” reminisces the actor.

While shooting Bhardwaj had promised Oberoi that he would win an award for his role in the film and it turned out to be true. Oberoi said, “He hugged me after my first shot and said, ‘You’re going to win an award for this. I was like really? And it came through, I won it [for Best Supporting Actor].”