Nitesh Tiwari locked Ranbir Kapoor and Yash with relative ease. But signing the patriarch proved an entirely different ordeal. Veteran actor Arun Govil—whose face remains permanently etched into India's cultural memory as Ramanand Sagar’s Lord Ram—spent three stubborn months batting away offers to join Tiwari’s upcoming two-part epic, Ramayana. He simply did not want the job.
"Would you believe it, I didn't want to do it at all," Govil revealed, recounting how the production team hounded him across weeks of polite refusals. "Frankly speaking, I didn't feel the need for it when it was offered to me." Tiwari, however, refused to take no for an answer. The director pushed back relentlessly, cornering the veteran star until the casting room began joking about the absurdity of the delay. Production insiders quipped that signing box-office heavyweights was a breeze compared to getting Dashrath on board. Govil finally relented.
The decision locks in an unprecedented full-circle milestone. Govil now holds an unmatched distinction across screen adaptations of the epic: he portrayed Lord Ram on national television in the late 1980s, suited up as Lakshman in the 1997 feature Lav Kush, and now steps onto set as King Dashrath. Three distinct generations of the Ayodhya dynasty, captured across four decades by a single actor.
Yet slipping into Dashrath’s skin required surprisingly little reinvention once cameras rolled. Dashrath’s grief and regal bearing had lived in Govil’s subconscious since his youth. "Even at the time of Ram, Dashrath was comprehensible to me," Govil explained. "To understand Ram's emotions, Dashrath's emotions were there in front of me." He added that drawing out the monarch's fierce parental devotion came without friction—Govil is the father of a 46-year-old son in real life, making the emotional stakes immediate and recognizable.
The production surrounding Govil is massive. Mounted on an unprecedented ₹4,000-crore budget, Tiwari’s two-part venture stands as the costliest cinematic gamble ever attempted by Indian studios. The film has already kicked off an aggressive international outreach, including a high-profile industry screening in Los Angeles on October 27 to test global waters.
Do not expect to see Govil on an assembly-line schedule after wrap, either. The veteran actor confirmed he has refused every incoming script post-Ramayana, flatly turning down routine commercial projects. For Govil, returning to the epic required three months of relentless persuasion—and matching that bar will take far more than ordinary cinema can offer.