Shantanu Maheshwari found smoking cigarettes tough

MUMBAI : Actor Shantanu Maheshwari, who had to smoke cigarettes for a few scenes of his new show, found smoking quite tough.

He will be soon seen in the digital show "Medically Yours", which will shed light on the lives of medical students and the hardships they have to face. It will showcase Shantanu as Abir Basu, who has a complicated personality with an angry side to him. He will be shown smoking in the show too.

"I had to smoke cigarettes for quite a few scenes in the show. While preparing for the character, initially smoking was quite tough for me as it was the first time that I was putting a cigarette in my mouth," Shantanu said in a statement.

"It was important for me to live up to my character's essence, so I pushed myself to do the best I could. It increased the throat infection that I had caught onto and made it even more worse than it was over those couple of weeks. There isn't even one scene where I haven't coughed while smoking. But I decided that I had to complete them all in sync, to feel what my character was feeling."

While shooting those scenes, the one thing he realised was that for "youngsters especially, it is very easy to get addicted to smoking as there is immense peer pressure these days to look cool and do things that others are doing".

"Also, in our field there is always an endless wait between our shots. Somehow the easiest way to kill time and de-stress is to have that cigarette in your hand. But when I took those first few puffs, it just didn't feel healthy and it made me feel quite dehydrated," he said.