Zayed Khan crashing through a glass window and plunging down from the eighth floor of a high-rise onto a truck on the road! Shiney Ahuja jumping up to catch a helicopter and almost getting his head chopped off! Shah Rukh Khan jumping from a height of 15,000 feet! Everyone’s clapping, except the film industry’s stuntmasters.

Fact vs fiction
While it’s true that stars do some of their stunts, they are not even half as dangerous as they are made out to be. Says Sham Kaushal, action director of movies like Krrish,  Om Shanti Om, Don and Drona, “Every bit of the action is rehearsed and re-rehearsed by actors. Stuntmen often have to perform the stunt up to 10 times before the actor decides to do it even once.”

A  filmmaker would rather risk a stuntman than a hero on whom crores are riding. “With visual effects and computer graphics, it has become easy for actors to perform difficult stunts,” points out Kaushal. “Daredevil acts are always performed by stuntmen, never the actors themselves,” he adds.

Heroines on reel
With the men showing the way, can the heroines be far behind? Prakash, a certified sky-diver and professional stuntman (worked in films like Rang De Basanti), recalls a heroine claiming that she had done a dangerous ‘suspended bus stunt’.

“We had hoisted the bus at the height of 25,000 feet on a mountain. While the actor was replaced with a dummy doll, the actress was replaced with a  stunt performer. It is astonishing how actors come up with such falsities,” he says.

 In fact, Sanobar, stuntgirl and fitness instructor, who does most of the stunts for Bollywood leading ladies like Bipasha Basu, Priyanka Chopra, Katrina Kaif and Aishwarya Rai states candidly, “Most of the time when actresses declare that they have done their own stunts, it’s rubbish.”

Publicity pressures
With so much at stake, sometimes the actors themselves are forced to become accomplices to exaggerations. Kaushal cites the example of the accident on the sets of Krrish that was widely reported some time back.

“There was a big scare that Hrithik had injured himself while doing a stunt for the film in Singapore. While that added to the hype about the movie, actually nothing like that happened. Though Hrithik did injure himself, he wasn’t even shooting at that time - it was a stray accident off the sets.”